Yosemite National Park fired a park ranger last week for hanging a transgender pride flag on the park’s iconic El Capitan rock formation in May.
Shannon “SJ” Joslin, who has been a ranger and a wildlife biologist in the park since 2021, said they were fired Aug. 12 from what they described as their dream job. They said park leadership told them they “failed to demonstrate acceptable conduct” in their role by participating in the trans flag display.
“I’m devastated,” said Joslin, who is trans and uses they/them pronouns. “We don’t take our positions in the park service to make money or to have any kind of huge career gains. We take it because we love the places that we work. I have a Ph.D. in bioinformatics, and I could be making a lot more money in Silicon Valley, which is only a few hours away, but I made career choices to position myself in Yosemite National Park, because this is the place that I love the most.”
When asked for comment on Joslin’s termination, a spokesperson for Yosemite National Park said the National Park Service, which oversees Yosemite, “is pursuing administrative action against multiple National Park Service employees for failing to follow National Park Service regulations.” The spokesperson declined to say which regulations the employees allegedly violated.
Rachel Pawlitz, a spokesperson for the NPS, said the agency and the Justice Department “are pursuing administrative action against several Yosemite National Park employees and possible criminal charges against several park visitors who are alleged to have violated federal laws and regulations related to demonstrations.”
Pawlitz added, “We do not comment on the specifics of personnel actions or criminal investigations. However, we want to emphasize that we take the protection of the park’s resources and the experience of our visitors very seriously, and will not tolerate violations of laws and regulations that impact those resources and experiences.”
Most demonstrations require a permit, Pawlitz said, and as a result, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of California “is evaluating possible criminal charges based on a National Park Service investigation.”
Joslin, who is 35 and had been going to the park for more than a decade prior to working there, has written Yosemite climbing guidebooks and volunteered to work overtime to help issue hiking permits and manage traffic in the park. As a wildlife biologist, they managed the park’s “big wall bats” program, to study how bats use cliffs and protect them from a deadly disease called white-nose syndrome.
Joslin said they came up with the idea to hang the trans pride flag on El Capitan in the spring after President Donald Trump issued a variety of executive orders targeting trans people, including orders to change the federal definition of sex to exclude trans identities, restrict access to trans health care and prohibit trans women from competing in female sports.
Joslin said the flag display, which they organized with other LGBTQ climbers and advocates and participated in outside of work hours, was intended to celebrate trans people and show that everyone is welcome in the nation’s parks. The flag was up on El Capitan for about two hours when park officials told the climbers to remove it, though the climbers said at the time that they were not told that they had broken any park rules.
About a week after the display, Joslin said, park leadership told them they were the subject of a criminal investigation into the hanging of the flag. After that investigation, Acting Deputy Superintendent Danika Globokar fired Joslin due to their participation in what leadership described as the “flag demonstration,” Joslin said.
Joslin said they asked for evidence proving that the flag display was a demonstration but said leadership did not provide any.
They also cited the long history of a variety of flags being flown on the rock’s face, including by park employees. For example, park employees flew an upside-down U.S. flag during Yosemite’s firefall event in February to protest the Trump administration’s cuts of National Park Service employees. A group of activists also raised a “Stop the genocide” flag on El Capitan in support of Palestinians in Gaza in June 2024.
There was no policy prohibiting the display of flags on El Capitan until the day after Joslin and their team hung the trans flag, when the NPS issued a new rule banning the hanging of large flags in wilderness areas. Yosemite leadership updated the 2024 Superintendent’s Compendium to include the update.
“Hanging flags has been a tradition that climbers have done on El Cap for decades, and that’s both individuals who are visiting the park, but also employees that are on their off time,” Joslin said. “There’s never been any kind of ramifications to any of those flag hanging activities. I’m the only one who’s been fired for it.”
Joslin said two other NPS employees, including one who works in Yosemite and another who works in a different park, are under investigation for helping to display the trans flag.
Joslin said being fired from a federal position will hurt their ability to work for the government, or any other park, in the future. They plan to seek legal counsel to try to contest the decision, citing an executive order Trump issued on the first day of his presidency to protect free speech and end federal censorship.
“I’m going to fight this tooth and nail,” Joslin said. “I think that everyone as Americans should be upset about this, and it doesn’t matter who I am or what my identity is, this is a matter of free speech.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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