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.

The Drawer Still Wore The Magnets

May 8, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

Today is Amelia's thirty-ninth birthday, and tonight we're going out to dinner with my best friend Maddie—the kind of ordinary sentence that would have sounded impossible to the younger version of me who spent most of her life convinced she would always be standing just outside the circle of things, watching other people belong to each other while pretending she didn't notice.

There are lies so absurd they almost fail to hurt at first. They arrive too large for the room, too ridiculous to take seriously, and for a few seconds the mind refuses to organize them into pain. Then the body catches up. Then the old pattern presents itself with such clean familiarity that the actual sentence almost stops mattering.

Angie had made outrageous claims to Amelia about my career and my reputation. That I was never a lieutenant. That I cheated on her while we were together. That I was never career. That the work I spent more than two decades doing somehow did not count, or did not happen, or did not belong to me in the way I have always said it did.

It was not just inaccurate. It was career erasure from the very same person who witnessed me go to work every morning with a promise that no matter what happens at work, I will make it home safely. And yet I have spent most of my life listening to other people revise me for their own comfort.

My father revised my body. Schools revised my name. Doctors revised my future. Family revised my history. Strangers revised my womanhood. And now, apparently, my career had become something else people felt entitled to edit, as if the years I spent in high-volume fire, EMS, and rescue systems across New York State—from rural departments to the New York City metro area—were a story I had simply told too many times, and not a life that left its marks in my knees, my hands, my sleep, my posture, my dreams, and every room I still scan before sitting down. I still sit in the back facing the entrance, noting exit points, scanning the room as I enter.

I was a Lieutenant Specialist Firefighter and Paramedic, and I was career. I was issued a yellow helmet because, in practice, I had become a captain still wearing the coat of a lieutenant. The rank structure had its official language, but the work had its own truth. I was the lead. People looked to me when something was moving too fast, when the room had too much noise in it, when the first version of the plan was not going to hold, and when someone needed to make a decision before the situation made one for us.

My helmet was yellow. Because of that, anything I attached to my bunker gear carried reflective trim. In autistic fashion, I had decided to match the reflective trim with my helmet color to set me apart from everyone else as an officer. My bunker flashlight had school bus yellow reflective trim. My air bottle had school bus yellow reflective trim. Other pieces of equipment followed the same visual system. I did not choose it because it looked good. I chose it because visibility is not decoration when things are dark, wet, loud, smoky, and already halfway to chaos. It was accountability. It was identification. It was making sure that if someone saw that flash of yellow in bad light, they knew where I was, what role I held, and what I was attached to.

A lot of the guys mocked me for it. School bus yellow, they said. Short bus yellow. They were not subtle. Men rarely are when cruelty has already decided it is joking.

That used to piss me off severely, not because I lacked a sense of humor, but because I understood the insult underneath it. They were using the same color that marked my command function to imply that I was mentally slow. They were trying to turn visibility into humiliation. They were trying to make the sign of my role into a social defect.

And then, eventually, the system I built became company policy. Line officers were issued Streamlight flashlights for their bunker coats and instructed to mark them with reflective tape according to rank—red for lieutenants, yellow for captains, white for chiefs and assistant chiefs. The same people who mocked the system eventually worked inside it without question.

That is the part people often leave out when they tell stories about women like me. They mock the method first. Then they adopt it after it works. By the time policy catches up, nobody remembers who endured the jokes while the idea was still only useful instead of official.

I think a lot of my life has been like that. I was different my entire life. Not in the soft, vague way people say different when they are trying to be gentle. I mean different in the factual sense. Intersex. Autistic. Queer. Female in a world that kept trying to find some administrative excuse to make that more complicated than it was.

I do not consider my autism or my intersex variation to be disorders, regardless of the language other people attach to them. They are simply a part of who I am and exactly how I identify. But in the 1990s and early 2000s, autism was considered incompatible with my job. Not officially in every case, not always in policy language anyone would admit to later, but in the imagination of the culture.

Fire and EMS wanted intensity, pattern recognition, sensory tolerance, repetition, command, and obsession with detail—but they did not want the word autism anywhere near the personnel file. At one point, I wrote my name EMILY in letter magnets across the drawer assigned to hold my personnel file. I got written up often and wanted to make sure they knew where to find my file.

Someone at the office had formally documented this as a complaint and placed the paperwork inside the same drawer that still wore the magnets. That felt like the purest expression of governmental bureaucracy imaginable—an entire system willing to spend an hour or more of government time, money, paperwork, and manpower documenting a problem than the thirty seconds it would have taken to actually remove the magnets.

The best part is that they couldn't rationally justify finding someone for such a task, so the magnets stayed and occasionally another complaint about them would be added to the file.

People suspected, I think. They had to. I was too precise, too patterned, too direct, too vigilant, too attached to systems that made sense even when other people thought they looked peculiar. I had been formally diagnosed. My primary care doctors knew the whole story—my autism, my intersex history, the exact shape of my body and my life. I had to see the medical director every six months, and somehow neither condition made its way into my work file.

Somehow.

There are silences that harm you, and there are silences that keep you alive long enough to prove everyone wrong. I have lived inside both.

At work, my differences did not disappear. They spilled into everything. Not sloppily. Not as dysfunction. They became placement, preparation, redundancy, visibility, and anticipation.

I was one of only a handful of people who owned their own radio. Other people wore theirs loosely slung across their shoulders as a badge of honor, or an accessory, or some casual statement of belonging to the world of sirens and late nights.

Mine was always close to my body, on a crossbody strap, where I could feel the weight against my side. That weight felt safe to me. It was not about display. It was orientation. It was contact. It was proof that the line between me and the rest of the system was still open.

Because the radio was mine, I had it customized with a scan function so I could listen to neighboring mutual aid departments. That became important when I made lieutenant. I could hear the discussion before we were officially pulled into it. I could listen as the brass went back and forth deciding whether or not they were going to call us for coverage, whether the incident was big enough, whether the situation was getting away from them.

Most people heard traffic. I heard probability.

I would round up my crew and tell everyone to get ready because we were likely going to be called. Nine times out of ten, it became a full response. By the time the official request came through, everyone was already in gear. All we had to do was start the trucks and go.

That was not luck. That was not me playing with a radio. That was operational anticipation. That was the same mind that had learned as a child to listen for shifts in tone, footsteps in hallways, silence that meant trouble, and adults changing the story I was given a chance to explain what had happened. Trauma gave me vigilance. Autism gave it structure. The job gave it purpose.

People love to separate things that were never separate in me.

I kept Milwaukee lineman's pliers in the radio pocket of my bunker coat. People mocked me for that too. Of course they did. Any system I built before people understood it became a target. But it seemed simple to me. I could get to the pliers with my right (dominant) hand no matter what happened. If I had to, I could get to them with my left hand in a pinch. They were always Milwaukee lineman's pliers. Same feel, same weight, big red handles, same trust. I did not want a tool I had to think about. I wanted a tool my hand already understood in darkness.

Those pliers could break car windows if you hit the biting end at the right spot. They cut through wires and battery cables without complaint. In EMS, they opened oxygen tanks in an emergency, cut tubing, and could be used with paracord to improvise a tourniquet if the situation got ugly enough. There were so many situations handled simply by shoving the pointed ends into something and using the handles until the stuck thing changed its mind. Somehow it worked every single time. I had a carabiner on my belt too. I trusted both with my life. Same reason. Many functions. Low ego. High utility.

That was always my preference. Carry things that can solve more than one problem. Build systems that survive contact with reality. Put tools where the body can find them after the thinking brain has too much else to do.

People saw quirks. I was building survivability. I read emergency scenes the same way I read twelve-lead ECGs—pattern first, then deviation, then the quiet realization that something critical was about to fail. There is a difference.

I was the only person at work issued a Survivair SCBA while everyone else used Scott packs. Mine was issued specifically to me. My name was on the air bottle—SLATIN—along with RESCUE in 3M reflective lettering. The reflective striping was doubled, and I had an extra luminous pinstripe. Rescue crews tend to be very visually oriented people. It worked well.

That has been the story of my entire life. The system made an exception because the exception worked.

And somehow Angie would look at all of that—the career, the gear, the years, the rank, the calls, the people who knew me, the systems I built, the crews I led—and tell Amelia that none of it was real in the way I said it was.

The part that unsettles me is not that the claim was false. False things are everywhere. The world is full of people speaking confidently about lives they did not have the discipline to understand. What unsettles me is that Angie knew enough to know better.

Nearly twenty years is a long time to live near someone's truth. Long enough to know the difference between a job and a career. Long enough to know the difference between costume and calling. Long enough to see the exhaustion, the missed dinners, the late returns, the promises made before shift that no matter what happened, I would make it home safely.

The firehouse was not a story I told to sound interesting. It was the place that raised me after childhood failed to finish the job.

When someone who knows your history tries to rewrite it, the betrayal has a different temperature. It is not ignorance. It is not confusion. It is an attempt to relocate reality to a place where they feel less accountable to it.

I confronted her about it one night at Mom's house. Amelia was across the hall in her room at the front of the house while Angie and I sat in mine with the door half closed between us and the sound of the radio playing in the background.

She looked directly at me and said, "You were never a lieutenant. You were a volunteer." Then, almost seamlessly, the accusation shifted and she accused me of cheating on her too, as if both things belonged to the same category of invention.

The strange part is that my entire life I have bonded through friendship first. That was always my nature. If intimacy or sex ever emerged from that closeness, it only deepened the friendship that already existed. I remained friends with these women even though I had sexual relations with them at one point or another.

With Angie, though, I was completely faithful. If anything, I spent years setting aside my own needs trying to fill hers, convinced that if I just gave enough of myself away carefully enough, consistently enough, eventually the distance between us would close on its own.

It is not about rank. Not really. It is about credibility. It is about the lifelong experience of standing in front of people with evidence in both hands while they continue preferring the version of you that makes them more comfortable.

As a child, I had to prove I was a girl to people who had already decided my father's lie was easier to manage. As a teenager, I had to prove my queerness was not a phase, not a performance, not a misunderstanding. As an adult, I had to prove that my body was not a contradiction. That my autism was not incapacity. That my directness was not aggression. That my command was not attitude. That my difference was not evidence against me. And now this. Proving I was what I was at work.

There is something almost insulting about being asked to defend a life that already cost so much to survive. I do not need Angie to believe I was a lieutenant. I was there. My crew was there. The records were there. Reality does not vanish because someone tells a cleaner lie.

Still, I know why it hurts. It hurts because being different has always made me vulnerable to revision. People assume that if they cannot categorize you easily, then your own account of yourself must be negotiable. A woman like me is often disputed. I'm too tall. Too direct. Too intelligent. Too capable. Too autistic. Too queer. Too unwilling to soften the facts just because someone else is having trouble with them. They do it because the alternative requires them to admit that someone they underestimated was operating at a level they did not understand.

At work, my difference was everywhere. It was in how I wore my radio. It was in where I kept my tools. It was in how I read a scene before it declared itself. It was in how I arranged reflective trim. It was in how I insisted on consistency because consistency saves time, and time is sometimes the thing standing between a living person and a body. It was in the way I listened to radio traffic, the way I anticipated what was coming, the way I could feel a shift before other people named it.

The things that made me strange also made me useful.

That is the part people never know what to do with. They want difference to be either tragic or inspirational. Mine was neither. Mine was practical. It lived in my hands.

That is what Angie tried to take when she said those things to Amelia. But Amelia knows me. That is the strange mercy of my life now. Amelia knows the difference between a story and a record. She knows that my past is not decorative. She knows that when I speak about the fire/rescue years, I am not reaching for attention. I am naming the system that built me and nearly ruined me. She knows I still sit where I can see the door. She knows that I need the information—I do not like surprises because my whole life was one long series of other people deciding things about me before I got the chance to answer.

She knows. That matters deeply to me.