Sex Change : Firefighters Learn to Deal With Captain’s Decision

In the wake of a veteran fire captain’s decision to undergo a sex change, officials have been conducting sensitivity sessions throughout the Los Angeles City Fire Department to help the captain’s colleagues cope.

Capt. Michele Kaemmerer, who was hired by the department 22 years ago as Michael J. Kaemmerer, said the department has been supportive of her decision to be known henceforth as a woman and to remain a platoon commander at Station 62 in the Mar Vista area.

“(Fire) Chief (Donald O.) Manning has been fabulous,” Kaemmerer said. “I’m glad to be here. . . . This is my career, and I love it.”

Fire officials confirmed that ranking department officers and a department psychologist have been counseling personnel at Station 62 and other firehouses in the city to make sure the transition is as smooth as possible.

Kaemmerer, who is on vacation, is commander of one of three three-person platoons that work rotating shifts at the firehouse on Centinela Avenue.

The men in Kaemmerer’s platoon, who asked that their names not be used, all said they were glad to be working for the captain and had no objections to their commander’s decision to become a woman.

“It’s his own thing,” one of them said. “Whatever he wants to do, that’s OK with me.

“The department sat us down and talked to us about it a little while ago,” the firefighter added. “Nobody’s complained. No one’s transferred out. Nobody wants to.”

“Everybody knows about it,” another member of the platoon said. “It’s the kind of thing everyone talks about. But I don’t have any trouble with it, and I don’t know anyone who has.”

Kaemmerer, who said she had been asked by the department brass not to talk publicly about her decision to change her sexual identity, said she joined the Fire Department in 1969 because she found the work “very appealing.”

“I started out in South-Central Los Angeles as a regular firefighter, just like everybody else,” the captain said.

Over the years, Kaemmerer said, there were the usual number of close calls, including one in which she found herself on the crumbling parapet of a burning building.

“Right then, there was an earthquake,” the captain said. “It waved us around for a while. It was quite a trip.”

But the captain escaped unscathed, eventually advancing to her current rank and being assigned to the Westside station about a year ago.

Before joining the Fire Department, Kaemmerer said, she served as a meteorology technician in the Navy--”three years, four months and twenty-two days”--and as a research technician for Union Oil Co.

Manning issued a statement Friday afternoon saying that the department “has no opinion or policy regarding the decision which has been made by Capt. Kaemmerer.

“That decision is one which we regard as a personal decision, and we expect all employees to continue to treat each other with the utmost professionalism, courtesy and respect,” the chief said.

Kaemmerer becomes the second woman to reach the rank of captain in the Fire Department. The other one is Roxanne V. Bercik, who was promoted to that rank a year ago and commands a platoon with Engine Co. No. 21 in South-Central Los Angeles.

Kaemmerer and Bercik are the highest-ranking of the 39 women in the department.