EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

I Was Simply Uncooperative With Their Preferred Ending

May 13, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

It rained all morning in that steady Vermont way, not dramatic, just persistent enough to soften the edges of everything outside the windows. The grass took it without complaint. The pines darkened slightly. The sky hung low over the farm like it had decided today was not going to be a day it wanted to explain itself.

I walked out to where Amelia was sitting, and she commented on the rain. I looked at it for a second, sipping my morning coffee—the gray light, the wet fields, the house holding itself quietly around us—and said, "Wow, what a great day."

I meant it. That is the part people miss about me, I think. They focus only on the history, the diagnoses, the documents, the institutional problems, the firehouse years, my impossible father, the schools, the doctors, and whatever else they think explains a person from a distance, and they assume it all adds up to suffering as a primary condition.

It does not. In fact, I have always had an insatiable thirst for life, adventure, people, and the little unplanned exchanges that make existence feel worth staying awake for. I like rain. I like roads. I like women with complex minds. I like questions that arrive by text from another room. I like workspaces with too many devices and one exact pen that always seems to migrate to the wrong surface. I like the feeling of having somewhere to go, even when that place is simply the living room.

The world has spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to decide whether I am viable. I have spent most of my life being viable anyway.

Lately Amelia has been talking about college and being kicked out for being different. That word again. Different. It has followed both of us around like a stray dog no one wants to admit they fed.

I was kicked out of half my classes during my second year of college because I was queer, and some of my professors claimed religion as the reason they could not have me as a student. They said it as if my existence had become an administrative burden placed upon their conscience. I remember the tone more than the words—the careful phrasing, the desire to sound principled and justified while performing cowardice. They were not rejecting my work. They were rejecting proximity to the person doing it.

That same year, in English class, the professor spent an entire goddamn week discussing Nighthawks. A full week. Edward Hopper, loneliness, late-night artificial light, American isolation, the geometry of distance, all of which can be understood fairly quickly if one is paying attention. It is not that the painting is unworthy. It is that some academic rituals seem designed less to think and more to prove that thinking is occurring. After a full week, all we learned was that there were no exits present—effectively everyone was trapped inside the building, and if we look closely enough the woman's hand was close to, but not quite touching the man's. At some point, I was told I could drop the class if I did not want to spend a week being fascinated by something that only needed to occupy my mind for five minutes.

That felt accurate. I dropped the class. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead while a professor who probably thought Fleetwood Mac was dangerous looked at me like I was the beginning of societal collapse.

I was not as goth as the girl I knew from class who went all in, the one with skin white like a geisha, the kind of girl who looked as if she had been assembled from eyeliner, black fabric, and a private mythology no administrator would ever be brave enough to understand.

I was quieter. More like a girl inspired by Robin Tunney in The Craft—not costume, not performance, just a visual language that made more sense than whatever conventional femininity was being offered at the time. Dark clothes. Outsider softness. A kind of watchful refusal. I did not think of it as rebellion. I thought of it as getting dressed. I had a favorite shirt that had a crescent moon embroidered onto it.

My professors were not pleased. Of course they were not pleased. Adults who build their sense of order around obedience rarely enjoy seeing a young queer autistic intersex girl arrive looking like she had already rejected the terms of the room before sitting down.

My dorm room was another problem. According to the person the university sent around to inspect rooms, "there was supposedly adequate fluorescent lighting covering the ceiling."

Adequate according to whom, I asked, though nobody ever seemed entirely sure. Building code, probably. Some institutional assumption that if a room can be illuminated evenly enough to read a policy handbook, then it has been lit correctly. Even if over-illumination is present, at least we tried. But fluorescent ceiling light is not the same as a table lamp. It was never the same. Overhead lighting flattens everything. It makes a room feel exposed, public, and vaguely accusatory. A table lamp creates a place. A table lamp says here is a small pool of light where a person might safely exist.

People thought I was nuts for bringing a lamp into a dormitory room already equipped with enough overhead glare to interrogate a war criminal.

The room echoed terribly. Hard walls, hard floor, hard furniture, hard expectations. Every sound bounced around like it had nowhere else to go. A zipper was too loud. A drawer opening was too loud. Silence was too loud because the room itself kept answering back. So I covered the walls with cloth hangings because the echo drove me insane, and the wall coverings helped tremendously. Other people saw decoration. I was performing acoustic correction before I had the language for it.

The same thing has followed me my entire life. People saw quirks. I was building survivability.

I had multicolor Christmas lights strung around the perimeter of my bedroom as a child. I still have Christmas lights in my workspace, though now they are LED, which sounds like adulthood until you realize it is just the same nervous system with better bulbs.

Lighting has always mattered to me. I use table lamps with shades, diffused light washing across surfaces, accent lights under the bed and dresser, small glows tucked into corners, little constellations of controlled brightness in rooms where I am expected to think, write, live, and remain human. I do not want a ceiling full of light. I want layers. I want room for shadow. I want visibility without exposure.

I draw night skies whenever my drawings require a sky. The day is boring. The clouds come and go, the sun is there in its fury, and nothing else happens unless weather decides to make itself interesting. Night is infinitely more interesting. Stars. Planets. The moon. Distance. Darkness. Small flickers of lights holding their positions against something vast. Night does not flatten the world. It lets things show up on their own terms. The day wants everything visible at once. I have a difficult time trusting that.

In college, the rainbow flag on the inside wall of my dorm room was eventually deemed offensive and obscene. Not over the dean's desk. Not wrapped around a statue. Not stapled to some university seal with a manifesto attached. Just a rainbow flag in the room I was already paying double to occupy alone because the university could not figure out what to do with me.

That housing arrangement was its own little administrative masterpiece. My mother and I sat in front of the dean of students and demanded placement in either a female dormitory or a co-ed one for my second year.

The dean was a woman who had already gone on for several minutes about having been born in West Virginia, and how she never left. She cited her Christian values. She told us no, because according to my admissions physical, doctors had said I had male-looking genitalia, and therefore I could be housed with the boys. Penis equals boy. Such was her outlook and understanding of the world and how it worked. An entire institutional philosophy reduced to a bumper sticker with worse implications.

I lifted my university sweatshirt gently and showed her my upper body. I had a female rib cage. I had gone through puberty as a girl and had long since started growing breasts. I had been forced to wear loose clothing, especially sweatshirts in the boys dormitory due to university policy barring opposite sex from the dormitories.

My doctors in Upstate New York had said this would continue, and that there was nothing that could reasonably be done about it. The dean looked at me and said my upper body was very clearly that of a woman, and she was very confused. I do not blame her for being confused. Confusion is at least more honest than certainty built on bad premises.

The compromise was a single room in a co-ed dorm, and I had to pay double because I would not have a roommate. My mother and I agreed. It was both safety and isolation, which is how a lot of accommodations have arrived in my life. The system cannot understand you, so it gives you a room alone and charges extra for the privilege.

That single room was also the place where my flag became indecent. I pointed out that the boys' rooms had posters of women's breasts and genitalia in grotesque positions, overtly sexualized and treated as decoration, and nobody seemed interested in dragging that into the discussion of decency. The rainbow flag was not obscene. It was just queer. Apparently, heterosexual vulgarity was considered background noise, while queer visibility had to be treated like contraband.

I dealt with the same nonsense at work. Men had obscene images plastered inside their lockers, and nobody said a word.

My locker had pictures of Angie, Makayla holding my hand at the park when she was still a small child, one of Penfold. Naturally, mine was the one that made certain people from human resources uncomfortable.

I will never know how many feminine care products were taped to the outside of my locker over the years. Pads, tampons, whatever they could find that seemed, to them, like the pinnacle of humiliation. They thought they were insulting me by associating me with femininity and the reliance on commercial products marketed to assist with biological realities. These people were also paramedics—the stupidity of that still amazes me.

There were also photographs from work pinned inside the locker. Funny things. The moments that never made headlines because nobody outside emergency services would have understood why they mattered.

A snowman wearing a fire helmet outside our station. The fire chief passed out sitting upright on the living room couch, still wearing his white coat and helmet. A photo of me and my crew sitting in power wheels that the local kids brought by to show off at the station after Christmas. One was a police cruiser, another was a fire truck. The kinds of things people laugh about quietly after surviving enough ugliness together.

Every time feminine care products appeared taped to my locker, the men's bunk room mysteriously developed plumbing problems.

I became extremely good with expired IV bags.

At first it was simple. Gravity-fed. Basic drip mechanics. A little clear tubing, a little patience, and just enough saline to make somebody wake up confused and deeply suspicious of the ceiling above them. Eventually the men started showing up early to claim the upper bunks, believing this represented tactical adaptation on their part. What they failed to understand was that I had grown up autistic, obsessed with systems, fascinated by infrastructure, and fully willing to weaponize both drop ceilings and discarded aquarium hose in the pursuit of equal opportunity inconvenience. The upper bunk strategy failed quickly once I started routing lines through the ceiling tiles.

Oddly enough, it improved morale.

Most of the public only ever sees emergency services at the point where tragedy becomes visible. They do not see the absurdity, the exhaustion, the private ecosystem that forms inside stations and trucks over years. They do not see the tiny moments that keep people human enough to continue doing the work. My locker looked less like a political statement and more like evidence that I had actually lived a life there.

The sexual harassment stopped immediately when I pointed out that I was on a first-name basis with their wives and girlfriends, because let's face it—girls stick together.

When Amelia and I were dating, she saw me without clothes on for the first time and later admitted she was confused as to why I was obviously a queer woman but had male-looking genitalia.

I respect that she told me the truth. I respect confusion when it does not become cruelty. She had known before we were intimate that I had been to the gynecologist, and that part made sense to her. My documents said female, my medical care included female care, my social presence read as a queer woman, but at that time my name had been changed to a male one, and my anatomy complicated the picture. At first, she thought maybe I had transitioned to male, but even that did not make sense to her.

I have my own quirks, and by no means are either of us perfect. Amelia cleans her silverware with a paper towel before rinsing it in the sink and putting it in the dishwasher, which feels like a multi-step sanitation ritual designed by a committee of one. She often comes to me just before seven in the morning with physics theories when I'm still waking up. She asks hypothetical questions about philosophy over dinner and expects the conversation to survive contact with food. Amelia annoys a lot of people. Not me. Quite the opposite. I am thrilled to call her my wife.

Some people meet a mind like hers and experience it as interruption. I experience it as a mind I understand. She has her own routes through the world, her own systems, her own habits, her own sharp little private logics. The paper towel before the rinse before the dishwasher. The early-morning theory discussions. The dinner question that begins with something innocent and ends somewhere near the heat death of the universe.

We both require internet to be available at all times. Not because we are fragile without it, but because it functions as infrastructure for our minds. Amelia has an iPhone, a Chromebook, and a Windows desktop I custom built for her. I am all Apple architecture—MacBook, iPad, AirPods Pro, iPhone, and a custom Mac Studio. My ecosystem is not a preference so much as a continuity system. The devices hand off information without behaving like competing bureaucracies.

Amelia and I are obsessed with mesh networking. That probably sounds ridiculous to anyone who has never loved a house enough to want it fully connected. We have workstations throughout the house like satellite nodes of thought. My bed has a folding table for the MacBook Pro. I have an office and creative studio with the Mac Studio. The living room has my childhood bedroom furniture and a workspace where I build things with Raspberry Pi, wireless projects, crafting materials, and whatever device currently requires attention. The garage serves as barn storage and maker space. I write wherever I happen to be.

The house is not organized around rooms so much as functions. Thought moves. Work moves. Writing moves.

I built a web server in the basement so Amelia and I could collaborate in real time with many terabytes of files available locally and instantaneously because they are local. RAID 6, of course, with regular snapshots. There is no reason to build a shared intellectual life and then trust it to a single point of failure like an amateur.

The server hums below us quietly, holding files, drafts, photos, diagrams, ideas, backups, and whatever else two autistic women with too many projects and not enough patience for latency decide belongs there. Some couples have a shared junk drawer. We have local enterprise storage with redundancy that used to be reserved for information technology departments.

We also have handwritten notebooks we allow each other to read. Nobody else. The notebooks are different from the server. The server is collaboration, speed, archive, continuity. The notebooks are handwriting, pressure, private thoughts. Amelia can read mine. I can read hers. That level of permission does not come from romance. It comes from trust that has survived being tested in ordinary, unglamorous ways.

Amelia and I very rarely call each other by phone. Most of our communication is text. People treat that like a deficiency because they are still invested in outdated hierarchies of closeness. A phone call interrupts. A text waits. A text lets the sentence arrive without dragging the whole room into it. A text can be answered from the garage, the bed, the studio, the kitchen, the living room, or wherever the thought happened to land. It is not distance to us, it is a form of intimacy.

Even my neighbor Trish texts me interesting questions from time to time. I wish she would send them more often. There is something deeply satisfying about a question that arrives from someone else's mind without ceremony. It says, I was thinking, and I thought of you. That is one of my favorite forms of connection.

My diagrams begin on the iPad with the Apple Pencil. Then I run them through software to clean them up. Hand first, refinement second. That seems to be the pattern in my life. The original line matters, even if it needs correction later. Clean enough to communicate. Human enough to stay mine.

Teachers and doctors always singled me out. Doctors have always wanted a cleaner line than biology was willing to provide. When I was sixteen, every adult except Mom told me that I could not live my life as a girl if I had a penis. I asked why not. Was there a rule somewhere that said I could not, or that I was not allowed? And if such a rule existed, what gave some external entity the authority to override my internal understanding of my own being and how I related to the world? That question became the core of my existence. Why not? That too remains unanswered.

It is such a simple question that people mistake it for defiance. It is not always defiance. Sometimes it is a demand for established structure. Show me the law. Show me the rule. Show me the mechanism by which your discomfort becomes my obligation. Show me why a paperwork category, an anatomical observation, or a social assumption should outrank the lived continuity of the person standing in front of you.

My pediatrician at the time said maybe I knew something they did not. I was sixteen.

In the doctor's office, the gender affirming surgery discussion took center stage around my college years. They seemed to think nineteen or twenty was some ideal point, as if adulthood arrived with a surgical calendar attached. Everyone was trying to figure out which path in life I was going to take. Apparently, I went my own path, much to the dismay of those who felt like they had a say in the matter.

When doctors brought up my "boy parts," I pointed out that they had never once been an issue at any time in my life except when I was on a doctor's exam table. The problem appeared exclusively and reliably in rooms where people wore gloves and turned biology into a binary classification problem.

I told them they were dismissing biological nuance and replacing it with their Westernized binary views on gender. I did not say it because I had read the right books. I said it because I was sitting there as living evidence that their model had failed to account for reality.

They became visibly frustrated when my annual physicals stopped functioning as straightforward examinations and instead turned into philosophical discussions about gender roles, social expectation, and the remarkable lengths people will go to in order to preserve a binary worldview that reality itself does not consistently support.

I kept pointing out that they were searching for a surgical solution to a hypothetical problem that did not actually exist anywhere outside the discomfort of the people attempting to define me.

My body was not preventing me from living my life. Society was struggling with the fact that my existence complicated a model it preferred to keep simple. The issue was never truly anatomical. It was societal.
When Amelia and I moved to Vermont, doctors wanted proof that I was intersex and demanded all the tests be repeated.

I said that was not a medical problem. It was a paperwork problem. They simply needed to contact my previous hospital system and obtain the records they required. I said no to the tests. Not because I reject medicine. I reject unnecessary repetition conducted for bureaucratic comfort.

On paper, I have a grade eight education. That sentence still amuses me. I was handed a grade eight diploma with the understanding that I would leave school two weeks early and not attend graduation.

Boarding school denied me a diploma, which I do not entirely blame them for, given that I skipped class, hitchhiked, and temporarily ran away my senior year. It apparently took them nearly four whole years to realize I was really a girl being sent to an all-boys school. I never finished college.

Employers eventually found out I had only officially completed grade eight. Two called my employment into question. The last department to do it was the same one that promoted me to lieutenant. I cited twelve years of getting consistent results. In the grand scheme of things, is that not what matters? Apparently not. Institutions love outcomes until outcomes threaten the paperwork mythology explaining who is supposed to produce them.

I used to love saying "watch me" to people. Why not was the question. Watch me was the answer.

Those phrases carried me through more than they probably should have. You cannot live as a girl if you have a penis. Why not? You cannot survive without the diploma. Watch me.

I did not ask those questions to be difficult. I asked because the answers were often missing.

The Westernized post-industrial educational system failed me and wasted my time. I remember in my second year of college sitting through a week of Nighthawks and being told to drop the class if I did not wish to participate in the ceremonial appreciation of a painting my mind had already processed. It failed me long before college. It failed me every time it mistook speed for arrogance, difference for disruption, autonomy for pathology, and survival for noncompliance.

The teacher who told me I would amount to nothing currently lives in the same town where they were born, never left, and is a raging alcoholic. I do not say that with triumph. Alcoholism is not funny. But there is a particular adult clarity that arrives when you realize the people who once spoke most confidently about your future were often trapped inside the smallest and most restrictive versions of their own lives. They were not prophets. They were employees with opinions.

I think about this when Amelia talks about college. College and the years she spent growing up inside a family structure that could not understand her are experiences she and I discuss often. Her stories do not land in me as anecdotes. They land as shared experiences. Two women who were each pushed out of institutions and families for being different.

We are not perfect.

I am stubborn, exact, impatient with redundancy, and prone to leaving systems the moment they begin to feel like cages. I can be too certain because uncertainty spent too many years being weaponized against me. I can sometimes be unintentionally mean to those who love me.

Amelia has her own strange intensities, her own rituals, like her own ways of arriving before seven in the morning with questions better suited to a graduate seminar than a household still negotiating breakfast. She can annoy people by being exactly herself.

Girls stick together.

That sentence has done more for my sense of belonging than most institutions ever did.

I have never been especially interested in being normalized. Normal has always seemed like a word people use when they have stopped paying close attention. I am interested in what works. There is no reason to pathologize a life that keeps functioning under pressure simply because it does not match the diagram.

I still think about a therapist years ago sending me for evaluation, and those doctors speaking as if my existence made other people uncomfortable enough to require intervention. I think about how quickly the problem dissolved outside their offices.

I had more reasons to stay alive than any clinical form could hold. Sometimes I think the entire mistake was that institutions kept measuring me as if I were unfinished. I was never unfinished—I was simply uncooperative with their preferred ending.