How Climbing Transformed This Fundamentalist Baptist Into a Nonbinary Influencer

Sunna Shinn started climbing on a dark day. Their bones were heavy, their mind was fogged over, and even the familiar mechanics of breathing were strained. They felt like they had a slim chance at a new life. Like the world had already made up its mind about them.

It was 2018, five years after starting seminary school and a year after moving to Brooklyn to step away from the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church, in which God dictated every movement and every moment.

“I was coming from a place where I felt a lot of external ideas and pressure about what people thought of me,” they told me during our first interview last October. That pressure had become too much, too sinister—heavy, thick, and insurmountable. And yet, somehow, on an average Bushwick morning, they pried themselves from their bedsheets to face another day. Far from home. Far from their family. Far from their church. Far from the little apartment on Avenue Q, deep in Brooklyn, where, just six months earlier, they’d thrown away their mother’s last prescription and witnessed her last breath.

They went to the gym on a friend’s recommendation, but their first day felt, in many ways, like yet another defeat. They searched for strength, for balance, for mindfulness, for a purpose, for some motivation—and instead found a challenge. Even the V0’s were hard. But despite their aching forearms, Shinn came back the next week. And the next. The movement offered something new outside of the church, their home life, and their expanding grief. What started as a few taxing hours of gravity and grit became a calling. The routes became a map to self-discovery.

“I felt like a kid again, like I was climbing trees,” they say. “I started to think about what my body was doing, which let me start to question things, and I pursued that ideology in other parts of my life.”

Now, after five years in the sport, Sunna Shinn identifies as nonbinary, embracing they/she/he pronouns. Climbing, which began as a means of escape, has become a celebration of their body outside the confines of the gender binary: a way of exploring the intricate topographies of self-expression and inspiring others—both as a coach and one of climbing’s biggest queer TikTok influencers—while simultaneously confronting their cultlike religious upbringing.

As a young person, Shinn, now 30, was “isolated and lost.” They were raised in a small Baptist neighborhood in Jackson, New Jersey—the type of place where missing Sunday service was whispered about. Their local branch of the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist Church was the backbone of who they knew, what they valued, and who they thought they were supposed to be. “It was very much a small bubble,” says Shinn. “And because of that, my entire life was mapped out. I lived at church seven days a week.”

Days unfolded in a structured rhythm, a chain of rituals—homeschool, outdated VHS tapes, a uniform of starched shirts and pleated slacks for the men and long, modest dresses for the women—designed to mold minds toward a singular purpose. From an early age, Shinn noticed a weight to the conformity that surrounded them.

“Everything I learned was within a certain narrative. It was all very much aligned with our beliefs,” they say. “I was surrounded by the same people all the time and invested in the lives of everyone around me, because we were in this ‘family’ together. I was programmed not to question things.”

But there were things to question. Their clothes never seemed to fit right—and neither did the schooling, teachers, parents, science classes, or endless sermons. Eventually, their nonstop obedience, once a testament to devotion, began to weigh heavy. Growing up, they’d never heard of a nonbinary person. But they knew homosexuality was a sin.

“That’s the thing about my own journey with queerness,” says Shinn. “Because I was in that space, I had no exposure to it. They were so adamantly against it. Every time I considered that myself, I just shoved it down.”

I planned to meet Shinn at VITAL, a climbing gym in Brooklyn, at 11 a.m. on a rainy October morning. By the time I arrived, Shinn was already warmed up—thin, sinewy, and sculpted from five years of bouldering.

Shinn knows that most people look at them and assume they are a man. They are lanky and shy with impossible cheekbones and small wire-rimmed glasses. Muscular, squared shoulders bear a flat chest and a pink sports bra. A small patch of stubble rests on their upper lip. Their hair is long and wispy, and it remains impeccably in place even while they climb. But regardless of gendered assumptions, Shinn just wants to be known as “someone that makes you smile to think about.”

In both their online presence and their work as a climbing instructor at a local NYC gym, Shinn challenges conventional representations of what a climber looks like, creating safe, inclusive communities rooted in strength, creativity, and queer joy.

For Shinn, climbing is an artistry of form and function, a way to embrace both feminine strength and masculine grace according to each problem’s demands. This novel approach has helped them to amass nearly 40,000 followers on TikTok, a platform they use to foster the queer climbing community in New York City and gyms across the country. They do this by sharing videos that normalize queer bodies in movement and that challenge conventional ideas of strength.

We settled on trying a tricky blue V6 that required a long reach and the right blend of tension and crimp strength. With a quiet intensity, they began up the problem, their fingers tentatively exploring its tactile code like a pianist searching for their first note. After they climbed it, I asked them who they were wearing.

“Muscle mommy,” Shinn said, with a term often used in reference to women weight lifters. “Growing up as male is a much different experience than growing up as female, because society views body weight and strength differently. So for me, when it comes to presenting strength, it’s fun. And I mean, the muscle mommies paved the way.”

They talked enthusiastically, stretching their fingers between problems and questions, admitting they never expected to build a following online. At first, social media was simply a tool for them to connect with other queer climbers, to find a community of people who enjoyed “just being human together.” Then they began to notice a gap.

“Along the same timeline as my climbing, I started to explore my gender and identity,” they went on. “So the purpose of climbing and the social media presence was to connect with more people who identify how I identify, and to be the kind of role model I was looking for when I started out.”

Shinn says that climbing naturally lends itself to building community, and as an instructor, they teach life skills, conflict resolution, stress management, and relationship-building alongside more typical technical skills and safety requirements. They’re also quick to tell you it’s a chance to goof around, have fun, and take some pressure off the day-to-day.

“With climbing, you’re depending on one another,” they told me, massaging chalk between their fingers. “You’re building trust in a very physical way.”

Still, being online has had challenges—negativity and hate tend to litter Shinn’s comment section.

“I try to ignore it, and honestly, I don’t have the emotional capacity to fight back at this point,” they said. “It’s something I’m working on, but right now, I’m just allowing myself to keep my distance. Unfortunately, I think that’s the price of being visibly queer online.”

With a subtle, practiced motion, they pushed their glasses up their nose and refocused their gaze on the boulder in front of us.

“In New York, there’s a lot of diversity, but online, there’s another facet of that. I connect with a lot more people in sparsely populated areas, so being able to do that makes me feel very special,” they said. “Because of my background and because of how limited my exposure was, I wasn’t able to meet anyone who defied any social norm of any kind. Honestly, climbing was a way to recover my truth.”

Days as a child in the Open Door Bible Baptist Community were structured around service, each flowing predictably into the next like pages in a dog-eared hymnbook. The church was a sanctuary, not only of worship but of shared purpose, a place where Shinn sought meaning through faith. Within this, they were often at odds with their mother, who, Shinn says, “never understood or supported what I stood for.” Small things, like carrying their books in a “feminine” way or being “softer around the edges,” were scrutinized.

At 20, they moved to a stoic, whitewashed Independent Baptist seminary school in Lancaster, California. It was desolate and deliberately in the middle of the desert.

Seminary life demanded conformity, a strict adherence to the prescribed doctrines that left little room for introspection. There, dogma wrestled with self-discovery. Days were spent in silent prayer and nights in silent unease.

“Any thought that deviated was considered bad and your fault. I never wanted to be ‘wondering’ wrong,” says Shinn. “So I did everything I could to make sure that everything within me aligned with what He believed, and what His plan was for me.”

But they gradually realized that the chapel’s sobering exterior mirrored the harsh convictions inside—that though the seminary was a place where the sacred and earthly intertwined, it wasn’t one that saw Shinn’s beauty as part of its natural extension.

This realization ultimately led to the difficult decision to leave the church in 2017, and later, it allowed Shinn to stare down their wardrobe and look for pieces that hung differently, flowed easily, and dared to challenge the contours of the “masculine” frame they were born into.

“Having grown up with older siblings, I became familiar with how clothing would feel a bit too big when I was younger and a bit too small as I continued to grow,” they say. “This body, also a hand-me-down of sorts, was always something that I thought I’d grow into. But I’ve learned that life is a lot less about fitting in and a lot more about making things fit.”

Later still, it meant picking through their morals to decipher what was fundamentally theirs and what was fundamentally Baptist.

But before they could do this, the phone rang. Shinn’s mother, Tan Thai, had stomach cancer.

Thai, a woman of immense tenacity, had fled war-torn Vietnam, seeking refuge in a cramped Brooklyn apartment on Avenue H. All nine of her siblings piled in, huddled side by side on the damp floor during their first frigid New York winter. They slept, sweat, and shivered together, trading the familiar green of Vietnam for a few lonely trees watered by an overflowing storm drain. Thai quickly learned English and worked tirelessly as a telecommunications professional in two time zones, starting her own business and napping between work calls. She met her husband, Kee Shinn, at a Fundamentalist Baptist service. The church quickly became the bedrock of her new American life—a kind, family-focused community she’d not otherwise found in her new country.

But for Sunna Shinn, the church held a host of conflicting duties, identity, and pride—and their relationship to their mother was complicated, painful, and always in flux. “Being a child, and watching your family work so hard for you to have a better life—you try and live up to all of that sacrifice, that debt they’ve acquired for you, and you ask yourself if it’s morally right or wrong to do the things you want.”

Caring for their mother so soon after they left seminary was difficult, Shinn recalls. “I felt an immense responsibility, knowing how hard she had worked, and how much she sacrificed for me her whole life.”

In those last days of Thai’s cancer, Sunna filled prescriptions, changed bedsheets, and helped their mother to and from the cramped shower, up and down narrow flights of stairs, across subway platforms and busy sidewalks. Loss felt heavy, desolate, permanent—and on its way. “Seeing someone you care about losing their lifeforce in front of you… It was one of the most difficult experiences I’ve gone through,” they say.

When their mother ultimately passed, Shinn grappled with the life they’d led, the people they’d loved, and the lonely space ahead. Their once-unwavering belief system finally unraveled.

Back in the gym in Brooklyn, a comfortable silence settled between us. With one eye on a new problem and the other on the crowd nearby, Shinn told me that climbing, in many ways, allowed them to celebrate their physical form in a way they hadn’t known they needed. “When it comes to gender and climbing, really, I am the source. The internal drives the external,” they said. “There’s something really beautiful and simple about that.”

I was still stuck on that first blue V6—and, hopping up to the first crimp, I was quickly bucked off.

They urged me to find the flow, to move through the problem with balance. Between the adrenaline and the sweat, I reached up, searching for enough slope in the hold to press my weight into, acutely aware of my fingernails digging into the harsh plastic. And then, as swiftly as I found the balance point, I slipped off.

But Shinn approached my failure with patience and empathy, like any good teacher. “Work with it, not against it,” they assured me.

The sport, according to Shinn, is a great metaphor for this. When you climb, the dichotomy of masculinity and femininity dissolves. The weight of each is narrowed into smaller movements and challenged by subtle shifts and focused precision. Here, progress is earned through effort and determination. Here, the precipice of fear meets the precipice of achievement. Each boulder problem carries with it the potential for triumph or defeat, and within this contained world, there is solace in the simplicity of that struggle. At climbing’s core, there’s also a great deal of fun—a place to enjoy movement, to share intimate moments with friends, and to goof around. In confronting insecure terrain then, what truly matters is not the label you wear but the fluidity with which you adapt, evolve, and, ultimately, solve the problems that beckon you.

“The gender euphoria I experience comes from simply being in my body,” they told me, their lips curling into a quiet, knowing smile. The same one, I imagine, that drives their daily communion with resilience.

 Ryleigh Norgrove is an avid hiker, climber, and freelance journalist who’s been missing her truck since moving to Brooklyn.

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