(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



A Transgender Ex-Firefighter Talks About Flags and Fireworks [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-07-08

So… you’re probably looking at the title and thinking, “The transgender ex-firefighter has written a piece in early July and claims she is going to talk about flags and fireworks. Given that there is no discernible relationship between transgender people and either flags OR fireworks, given that the relationship between firefighters and flags is minimal at best and the relationship between firefighters and fireworks is so obvious and trite that not even the transgender ex-firefighter would waste everyone’s time with such obvious drivel, and, finally, given that almost everything the transgender ex-firefighter has written so far has been about holidays, it is fair to assume that this will be a piece about American Independence Day, which was just recently observed.” That would be a fair assumption, but… it would be wrong! Not everything the transgender ex-firefighter has written has been about holidays! Really… it hasn’t… I mean, it might LOOK like everything has been about holidays given that they have featured in almost every piece on Daily Kos so far, but that is just coincidence… really… coincidence… pure coincidence… it never occurred to me (is it okay if I use ‘me’ now? Cis people get all worked up about pronouns, so much so that I am scared to use them! Every trans person I have ever met feels the same; we have more than enough to worry about than to care about pronouns as much as cis people do! I worry about being beaten, stabbed, or shot; misgendering hurts, but not nearly so much as those other things. I get it; when you see someone with long hair wearing a dress, heels, and makeup while carrying a purse, it can be EXTREMELY difficult to choose an appropriate pronoun. Most of us trans people cop out by simply trying to be polite and not making a big deal about the issue. I do so wish that cis people would do the same… anyway, if it is okay with everyone, I am going to start using pronouns for myself because it is a royal pain to keep writing ‘the transgender ex-firefighter’. I sincerely apologize to anyone who is offended that I am not treating pronouns with sufficient diffidence. Just put it down to me being one of them.) to use holidays as a thematic connecting device between pieces written over irregular time spans… never… not once… really!… you CAN stop politely smiling while gently shaking your head, you know…

Anyway, I will prove my point by starting with a war story (not a firefighter war story, but a war war story) that doesn’t involve American Independence Day at all. It was originally related in Bernard Fall’s masterful Street Without Joy , one of the most important books about the Vietnam Conflict that virtually no one has ever read. The structure is a little iffy, but the stories…

This story occurred during the French phase of the conflict. Fall was watching some French officers and their paramours in the tennis whites playing tennis one evening. In came a French soldier, a high-ranking NCO who just needed an officer’s signature on his travel orders so he could travel to his next opportunity to die for France. He stopped and waited. And waited. And waited. It wasn’t that the officers didn’t recognize him, it’s that they WOULDN’T recognize him. You see, he may have been a French soldier, but he wasn’t French; he was Vietnamese. He may have had (and DID have) a chest full of decorations demonstrating his extraordinary willingness to perform extraordinary deeds for France, but he wasn’t French; he was Vietnamese. He may have been or done anything at all, but it didn’t matter; he was Vietnamese. So, they played and played. He waited and waited. And waited and waited. And waited and waited. In the distance, taps began to play (it was evening after all). The NCO stood to attention, ramrod straight, and saluted the tricolor as it was lowered for the night. The officers and their paramours kept on playing.

Fall tells it better than I could in my quick synopsis. Just thinking of his telling brings tears to my eyes. Huh, and I’m supposed to be a Quaker.

Now, why would I bring up this story of all stories? No firefighters, no trans people, not even any tacos! Has the transgender ex-firefighter lost her mind? (Probably, but that’s not terribly relevant here.) (And I must point out, my earlier drafts all say ‘his mind’ instead of ‘her mind’. I HATE pronouns! Do you really think we trans people are going to throw fits over pronouns when many of us can’t even get our OWN right?) I brought this story up because it is, in my mind, a beautiful study of the performative nature of so many of our public behaviors. There are so many layers to this story that one could easily talk for pages and pages on that topic.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about…

I mean, it WAS what I was going to talk about when I thought I could post this before July 4th. I had created a really tightly structured piece, filled with irony and coincidences that weren’t actually coincidences after all, loaded with abstruse connections that allowed me to show off my interests in all sorts of esoterica. It was quite good. But then, Sunday June 30th happened. Someone set a fire near Couer d’Alene so he could shoot and kill responding firefighters. Which he did. I didn’t want to talk about the performative nature of anything anymore. I didn’t want to talk about flags or fireworks or hot dogs or apple pie or stochastic terrorism or full-on terrorism or a president who couldn’t be bothered to say much of anything or… I talked about cookies, because I had to talk about something to keep me from doing something stupid.

July 4th came, and my incomplete diary was just as incomplete as it had been several days before. No one was talking about the shooting because the president’s travesty of a bill had been passed, and that mattered more than a couple of firefighters. Firefighters die on the job; everyone knows that. Every firefighter knows that’s a risk and responds to the call anyway. There are more important crises to think about. And with the Texas floods? Any remaining thoughts about the firefighters were washed away. That’s how the news cycle works; everyone knows that, even firefighters.

Fall’s story still stuck in my thoughts though. I was especially reminded of it while reading all of the comments here, and elsewhere, filled with glee at the upcoming tragedy soon to befall those rural folk who had thrown in their lot with the current president. FAFO. I saw that repeated everywhere. FAFO. On the Fourth of July, the stage was set for a whole lot of FAFO. I admit, I felt some satisfaction in that thought. I still feel some satisfaction in that thought. But…

Fall’s story STILL stuck in my thoughts. I don’t know if the French officers survived the coming debacle. Maybe they survived, but wished they hadn’t. Maybe they survived only to join the putsch against DeGaulle in Algeria. Their hypocrisy that evening certainly seems to invite a hope that they FAFOed. But what about the NCO? He certainly backed the wrong side. I don’t know what happened to him either, but the odds were it wasn’t something good. You can argue he backed the oppressors, that he was a traitor to his people. You can also argue that he was a man of the greatest honor. Can we apply FAFO to him?

Now I am going to touch some nerves. How about the firefighters in Idaho? They knew they were heading into a dangerous, potentially deadly situation. They didn’t know the actual threat they were facing, but they knew what they were risking nonetheless. Our current president would probably call them “suckers”. For all we know, they were themselves MAGA supporters. It’s common enough in that area, particularly among law enforcement and fire suppression personnel. Does FAFO apply to them? (By the way, if you think so, please don’t comment on this diary. I am obviously asking this rhetorically. If you think FAFO applies to these firefighters, I never, never, never want to associate with you. Not in person, not online, not in any fashion at all. If you are in trouble and I am near to help, I will do everything in my power to assist you, but, otherwise, I NEVER want to associate with you. Just sayin’.)

FAFO… I am going to give you a firefighter’s opinion of that. I have talked before about firefighters and the Fourth of July. A firefighter gets to see brush fires, house fires, blindings, horrible burns, crippling injuries… most of these are caused by improper, usually illegal, use of fireworks. Firefighters risk their lives trying to aid people who made conscious decisions to endanger themselves and others. My, these sound kind of like FAFO situations, don’t they? Yeah… NO! There is no schadenfreude to be had here. There is pain and suffering and everyone I know and care about would and will do everything in their power to ease those things. I have NEVER heard a firefighter say anyone deserves anything like this. Have there been some who have? I am sure there have; there have been firefighter arsonists for god’s sake. But that means only that you can find psychopaths and sociopaths anywhere.

So… that bill signed, I think signed, on the Fourth of July. Am I going to celebrate the upcoming FAFO of so many people? Remember, I am transgender; many of these people have explicitly said that they want to torture to death everyone like me. I think, if anyone has the right to glory in the FAFO these people are going to face, it should be me! But I won’t. I admit I kinda want to, but I won’t. That’s the sort of thing THEY do.

I adore the transgender flag. I think it is the most beautiful flag on the planet. I can’t display it. I would put at risk everything I have tried to build in my community if people thought that I was political, that I was proselytizing, that I was anything other than the brave, funny, dedicated, personable, SAFE, crazy trans lady who is thoroughly eccentric and thoroughly normal all at the same time. If I am safe and oddly respectable, maybe other trans people are too. I can’t put that at risk; no flag for me. Why do I bring this up? Because we are fighting a war for the soul of our country, and I am not willing to risk defeat by giving in to desires that render our already difficult challenge even harder to meet. All of my talk about flags and fireworks, it has all been about FAFO. It’s a luxury we can’t afford.

I will end with another view of FAFO. We trans people, we know that our experience of life is utterly incomprehensible to cis people. Hearing that offends many cis people. I get it; most people don’t like to be told that something is so far outside their experience that they will never understand it. I cannot understand what it is like to NOT think about the incongruity between my physical experience of gender and my mental experience of the same 24/7/365. I cannot understand what it is like to feel like anything other than a stranger in my own body though, now that I am transitioning, I am beginning to accept that it MIGHT be possible. Living as a trans person, and this is ignoring all of the hatred and spite we have directed at us, is grueling beyond my capacity to explain. You would think then, that we trans people would regularly wish that the people who hate us, or even just dismiss our descriptions of how difficult our lives are, could be forced to experience life as we live it. Now, that would be some ultimate FO! The vast majority of us do not wish that though. The vast majority of us would not wish our lives on anyone. We don’t have any choice for ourselves ; if we want to keep on living, we have to keep on experiencing life as trans. But we don’t wish that on anyone else.

Think about the people in Fall’s story. Think about firefighters and transgender people, about fireworks and flags… and then think again about FAFO. It’s going to happen. We can’t do anything to stop it now. All we can do is decide how we want to react to those who are going to suffer. Do we want to be like the MAGA crowd and take joy in the suffering? Or do we want to be like firefighters who will do what they can to alleviate it and like transgender people who refuse to wish the worst on anyone.

Yeah, I know, what a choice… be like a MAGA “citizen” or be like a trans person…

The choice IS coming though, and probably coming soon. I know what choice I am going to make.

Soaked Ferret

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/7/8/2332290/-A-Transgender-Ex-Firefighter-Talks-About-Flags-and-Fireworks?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/