EMILY PRATT SLATIN

About

Press Kit

Notebook

Music Playlist

She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

I Made A Promise To My Father

As fall approaches, I always start thinking about the year.

There is something about the first change in the air that makes time easier to see. This summer was, without doubt or reservation, the absolute best summer of my entire life. Then when September arrived the nights became colder, the light changed, and suddenly I begin thinking about the year—what happened, what changed, who remained, and who quietly disappeared.

This year, more people I once considered friends disappeared from my life. I have a rule about that now. If I send someone messages and/or comment on their blog, and more than a year passes without a reply, while I can clearly see that they have continued maintaining an active social life without me, I delete their number from my contacts.

A year seems generous. It is long enough to account for work, relationships, illness, bad timing, forgotten messages, life becoming complicated, and all the ordinary reasons people temporarily lose contact with one another.

There are friendships that pause and friendships that end. I spent far too much of my life confusing them.

Two people I knew from summer camp were different. I eventually blocked them because whenever they called, they brought nothing but heartache with them.

The first wave of abandonment came when I did not graduate college. That was the point when people I considered friends disappeared from my life. Now, decades later, gender has become a convenient explanation for why the friendships could never have continued. Apparently my supposed transition became the clincher.

The problem with that explanation is that the transition they keep referring to never happened. I was born female. My body developed naturally as female. I have lived my life as a woman. I am a lesbian. I have spent an unreasonable portion of my existence listening to other people confidently explain an alternate version of my life to me.

Dad was especially talented at this. Before he died, he decided that he was going to show me how to write a novel.

He spent the better part of three years sitting at his desk with a Microsoft Word document, slowly creating what eventually became somewhere around nine hundred pages. Dad made me promise that if he died before finishing it, I would publish the manuscript for him.

I made my father a promise I already knew I would never keep.

The afternoon after he died, after the paramedics declared my father deceased on his bedroom floor, and the police wrapped up their paperwork and left, I saw the file sitting on his computer where I had watched him work on it for years. I printed the first twenty-five pages.

I made it through fourteen.

Dad had taken events from my life and turned them into fiction. The character based upon me was a middle-aged man whom everyone around him regarded as mentally ill and severely intellectually impaired. The character was tired of people referring to him as a man and desperately wanted a sex change surgery. Dad portrayed him as so stupid, irrational, and desperate that he eventually attempted to perform the surgery on himself.

My father had no medical training whatsoever. The anatomical terminology was correct.

I had spent enough of my life working in medicine to recognize the difference between someone throwing medical words onto a page and someone who had actually taken the time to learn the anatomy. Apparently Dad had researched it. Extensively.

That was perhaps one of the strangest parts.

He had taken the time to learn enough anatomy to accurately describe something that had never happened to me, while simultaneously refusing to understand the daughter standing directly in front of him.

The manuscript contained other things, too. There were hateful passages directed toward minorities, particularly queer people and sexual minorities. Some of what I read was so distorted that it barely seemed connected to reality. Dad appeared to have taken his anger, prejudice, fear of mortality, and his increasingly distorted understanding of me and placed all of it inside fiction.

By page fourteen, I understood what I was reading.

I stopped.

I shredded the pages I had printed. Then I returned to his computer, erased the manuscript, and overwrote the contents so that the file could never be recovered.

Dad had spent approximately three years writing it. I spent approximately three minutes destroying it.

I do not regret that decision.

My own father had written a fictional account using events from my life, portrayed the person based upon me as stupid and mentally diseased, mocked the very existence he had spent years trying to control, and then expected the daughter he was mocking to publish it for him after he died.

I declined the assignment.

The manuscript contents became considerably stranger after Mom began allowing me to go through Dad's things.

Somewhere among everything he had kept, I found a huge file containing my school and medical records going all the way back to my birth.

I was shocked.

There were records using the word hermaphroditism, the medical terminology used at the time. There were records documenting male genital anatomy while also documenting that my body was developing naturally as female. Therapists repeatedly documented what they described as a female personality throughout my childhood. There were school records, medical records, evaluations, and years of observations. There was a separate folder full of teacher complaints.

It was all there.

That was when everything finally made sense.

Also, I was proud of myself after reading some of the complaints. I'd forgotten I'd done some of those things and I'm now thankful that my teachers were kind enough to write them down.

Dad had not merely spent years misunderstanding something nobody could have known. There had been an entire paper trail sitting in a file among his things.

One of the things I learned was more about the circumstances surrounding my circumcision. Dad had insisted upon having me circumcised as a boy because he wanted everyone to know he had a son. Mom had objected. Doctors had warned that because I was born intersex, the procedure would be risky. Mom believed it should be my decision.

Dad wanted a son.

He got his way.

Years later, after Dad died and I discovered the records, doctors began putting enormous pressure on me to have another surgery. By then, I had received my inheritance and if my health insurance refused to cover it, I could afford it. Apparently the combination of Dad being dead and me having enough money made my genitalia an actionable item.

Mom and I watched a video of the proposed procedure together.

She watched for a while before announcing, "Your poor penis!!!"

That became dinner discussion at the farm for me and Amelia the next several months.

Everyone around me seemed to want the surgery for me. The doctors wanted it. Other people seemed to regard it as an obvious conclusion to a story I had never actually been living. I was only considering discussing it because enough people were telling me that it was something I should want.

Mom refused to decide for me.

"Well, it's your life, your decision."

She had the same answer to me proposing any radical decision in my life. Whatever made her daughter happy was, according to my mom, the correct one.

Eventually Amelia told me not to do it because it would fuck up my life.

The deciding factor was considerably simpler—I did not want it, and never did.

The doctors were offering me a solution to a problem I did not have. I was not distressed by my genitalia. I was not desperately waiting for someone to change my body. I had no secret lifelong desire for the procedure everyone seemed so convinced would improve my life.

The proposed surgery was a solution to a problem I never had, and therefore seemed unnecessary to me and Amelia. My doctor did not agree with this conclusion, and he instead scheduled a consultation with a surgeon.

Instead of accepting that I did not want the procedure, he increased the pressure. He told me that surgery was something that was going to happen within the next forty-eight months and that I needed to prepare myself for the eventuality.

Then he told me that without the surgery, nobody would ever be interested in me sexually again.

When I pointed out that I am a lesbian, he somehow managed to turn that into another problem. According to him, after they made what resembled a penis into a vagina, I would only be able to attract men, so perhaps I should consider becoming bisexual.

There are moments in life when a conversation becomes so detached from reality that continuing it politely only encourages the participants.

I looked him right in the eye.

"I get way more pussy than you ever will. In fact, I get pussy all the time. Fuck off."

I was telling the truth. I left.

When I checked out at the receptionist desk, I informed them that I would not be returning. I also mentioned that I found their billing practices somewhat confusing because every time someone at the practice touched my breasts, they sent me a bill, while all my female friends seemed perfectly willing to do it for free.

Then I left the practice permanently.

I have become more careful about friendship as I get older. Friendship is one of the few relationships in my life that I have always understood through choice. Even in a bureaucratic society, there exists no institutional paperwork holding two friends together.

Today I realized that even though I proposed adopting her legally at one point, Makayla has known me her entire life.

I met her when she was barely more than a year old. Somewhere along the way I became part friend, part parent, part aunt, part rescuer. I watched her grow up. I worried about her even when she wasn't struggling. I missed her when we stopped speaking briefly. Then she came back into my life and, at twenty-six years old, started introducing me to people as her mom.

There was no discussion where we formally discussed this. She simply introduced me that way. I realized today that I will be her friend for the rest of my life.

Maddie is different only in the amount of time involved. I met her two years ago.

Two years is nothing compared with an entire lifetime, yet time is a poor measurement of what someone means to you. Maddie became my best friend gradually enough that I cannot identify the exact moment when the friendship crossed whatever invisible line separates someone I know from someone I cannot imagine forgetting.

I do not believe I will ever forget her. I think our friendship will last for the rest of my life.

There are some people you simply never forget.

Those are the people I hold onto no matter what.