A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit from a former Yosemite National Park ranger who was fired after helping hang a large transgender pride flag on the park’s famous El Capitan rock formation.
Park ranger Shannon Joslin, who identifies as non-binary, was let go by the National Park Service in August 2025. Joslin sued the agency, claiming the firing was a retaliatory move that violated her First Amendment rights, aimed at punishing a specific political message. The termination followed the incident in May 2025 where Joslin, who was off duty at the time, helped display a transgender pride flag on Yosemite’s famous granite cliff.
A group of transgender, queer, and allied climbers unfurled a trans pride flag on El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, Calif., on Tuesday, May 20, 2025. The flag is the largest flag ever flown on the famed granite monolith in the park, and hangs beneath Heart Ledges, a symbolic location near the literal and figurative heart of El Capitan. (Carlos Avila Gonzalez/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
Joslin, along with a “coalition of LGBTQ activist climbers, known as ‘Trans Is Natural,’ said its members unfurled the transgender flag ‘in an act of solidarity and resistance,’” Breitbart News reported in May 2025.
“The ‘Trans Is Natural’ group conveyed that the flag display was in protest of President Donald Trump and his administration, citing the removal of transgender propaganda from government websites,” the outlet noted.
“Yes, I lost my job for this flag. But this wasn’t the first way that the Trump administration had been scaring us into silence as federal workers,” Joslin said in an interview with the Hill in March 2026. “And that felt wrong, too.”
In the ruling, Judge Jennifer L. Thurston of the Eastern District of California dismissed the case, finding that the court lacked the legal authority to grant the relief Joslin requested.
“The government has another more fundamental and more persuasive point: under the laws that Congress has passed, and under the legal precedent that a federal trial court must follow, this Court does not have authority to decide whether Joslin was fired for unconstitutional or illegal reasons, nor to block a hypothetical criminal case against them,” Thurston wrote.
Thurston was appointed to the federal bench by President Joe Biden after the Senate confirmed her nomination in 2021.
Joslin, who holds a doctorate in genetics and worked as a quantitative wildlife biologist, sought reinstatement to the position and asked the court to prevent any potential criminal charges related to the incident.
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