A woman doing a man’s job

As the fires raged in Los Angeles and Americans scoured social media for live updates and scraps of sane explanations of what was happening, a brief clip surfaced above the inferno—a 25-second excerpt from a video produced a few years ago promoting the inclusion and diversity of the LA Fire Department pursued at the expense of other essential tasks, like fighting fires.

A female deputy chief of diversity, perched on a stool, interposed between clips of women firefighters commiserating with the public and running with little to no strength or agility, explained it this way: “You want to see somebody that responds to your house, your emergency—whether it’s a medical call or a fire call—that looks like you. It gives that person a little bit more ease, knowing that somebody might understand their situation better. ‘Is she strong enough to do this?’ Or, ‘You couldn’t carry my husband out of a fire.’ Which my response is, he got himself in the wrong place if I have to carry him out of a fire.”

Juxtaposed with the vast and unfathomable devastation of a beloved American city, Deputy Chief Kristine Larson’s cheery attitude is a cruel exercise in saying the quiet part out loud. Though everyone knows that a woman cannot do everything a man can do (nor can a man do everything a woman can do), that knowledge has been dutifully ignored, if not suppressed. But now, as the destitute residents of Los Angeles pick over the ashes of their smoldering homes, we discover that Larson had already publicly acknowledged this essential biological fact with no embarrassment whatsoever.

Decades of trying to undo the gender binary and this what we’re left with? A lesbian firefighter of color who is paid to rescue people from fires making light of anxious concerns about her physical capacity to do that job? The mocking acknowledgment that a man should not need to be rescued by a woman of whatever sexual identification or preference?

Not being a prophet, I could not have foreseen that progressivism’s ideological, intersectional house of straw would burn down so swiftly and so completely. At the spiritual core, Deputy Chief Larson is correct. It should never be the case that a man should have to be dragged out of a burning building by a woman. The world doesn’t work that way. Men are the ones who should be trained and set apart to rush into dangerous situations requiring feats of courage and strength for the simple and obvious reason that they are physically and emotionally designed to do just that. Did an entire city have to burn to the ground to rediscover this long-known truth? One would not have thought so, and yet here we are.

Such an eventuality might have been prevented by officials whose brains had not been addled by feminism and queer theory. Therefore, the next step is to apportion the correct blame. The deputy chief of diversity, DEI-certified through Cornell University, ironically, it must be observed, blames the public she serves for thinking she would care for men’s safety. She smiles and laughs, though perhaps the magnitude of the current disaster has eviscerated her complacency—one can only hope.

A better villain than the ordinary residents of Los Angeles who thought its fire department was there to put out fires would be all the men along the way who, through a toxic mixture of ignorance, pride, and greed, abdicated their responsibility to protect society from DEI-induced disaster. California Gov. Gavin Newsom should be on the list. Every single male LA City Council member. Anyone who voted to cut the fire department budget by $17 million and to appoint a deputy chief of diversity and (allegedly) pay her $399,000.

Do I sound bitter? Perhaps I am. The secular vision of equality is a farce and always has been. If there is anything to rejoice over as we pick through the rubble of clown world, it might be that no one has ever been fully deceived. Men can’t be women and women can’t be men. It was such a stupid exercise to pretend that any of us even wanted to change places.