EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

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

What Survives After The Label Peels Off

February 16, 2026—Middletown Springs, Vermont (Home)

This morning I woke up in a crummy mood—thinking about Mom, and how I've slowly been moving pieces of her life here to the farm. The last bed I used at Mom's now sits by my living room window. The pottery we made together when I was a kid, chipped from decades of wear, now rests in my childhood dresser drawers.

It's strange how objects travel more easily than people do. They don't argue. They don't defend themselves. They just arrive, and suddenly the room feels rearranged in ways you weren't prepared for. I stood in the kitchen longer than necessary, looking at the box under my childhood bed that holds our memories from New York City, and realized I've been carrying her in boxes instead of sentences.

That does not mean she was perfect. It does not mean she was always brave in the ways I needed her to be.

She tried to protect me from my father's abuse. I believe that. I saw it in small ways—how she redirected him when his voice rose, how she softened his edges when she could, how she stood between us without announcing that she was doing it. But protection in that house was rarely absolute. It was negotiated. It had limits. There were moments when she had to relent to his demands because the alternative was escalation, or divorce, or violence that would have cost more than either of us could afford. Sometimes she chose the lesser explosion. Sometimes she chose stability over defiance.

And sometimes she simply was not there for me at all. There were days when I needed her to step forward and she stayed quiet. Her loyalty to me and her loyalty to the marriage were in constant tension. Some days I won that tug-of-war. Most days I did not.

When I was eleven and wanted to attend summer camp, she agreed with my father that if I went, I would be enrolled as a boy. The camp was co-ed. There was room for me to exist honestly. But honesty was not the condition placed on my attendance. Compliance was. Mom could have said no. She could have refused the terms or demanded I go as myself. Instead, she accepted them, and I went under a designation that was never mine. I knew who I was. The paperwork did not change that.

Boarding school came later, and that compromise became heavier. Summer camp was seasonal, almost framed as harmless. Boarding school was permanent and all male. The paperwork was not temporary. The sign at the entrance stated plainly that it was a school for boys. The identity assigned to me followed me into dormitories, classrooms, locker rooms, and faculty meetings. And my mother allowed it to happen. She did not enroll me in secret. She did not fight publicly. She signed what needed to be signed and sent me away.

I have spent years trying to hold those truths together. The woman who felt like my best friend. The woman who laughed with me, protected me in quiet ways, and later told me she was proud of who I became. And the woman who agreed, more than once, to systems that required me to live as someone else in order to remain contained.

That is the rollercoaster. Not love versus hate. Not ally versus enemy. It was love braided with concession. Protection braided with surrender. There were nights she chose me and nights she chose peace. I learned early that adults are not singular. They are collections of decisions made under pressure. My mother loved me fiercely, and she also allowed things to happen that shaped the rest of my life. Both are true. I do not need to flatten either one to survive them.

Boarding school never felt like a chapter in my life—it felt like a controlled experiment. The campus was built out of brick and certainty, long hallways that echoed with shoes and expectation, dormitories that smelled faintly of detergent and adolescence. The main study hall building had an oversized bathroom that looked like it hadn't changed since the 1980s. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. The tile floor was always a little too cold. And the handicapped stall—enormous compared to the others—had become the unofficial message board of the entire school.

Every inch of the inside of that stall was layered in Sharpie ink and scratched initials. Gossip. Allegations. Rumors written like headlines. The kind of information boys didn't say out loud but needed somewhere to put. It was a confessional booth without absolution. I learned quickly that if you wanted to know what the school really thought, you literally read the writing on the walls.

Earlier that year, I made myself deliberately late to study hall, stepped into the bathroom I only ever used for the stall, and wrote above one of the urinals, "Too bad you're looking here. The joke is in your pants."

One afternoon I walked in, closed the heavy metal door behind me, and saw it written across the tile in uneven black ink: "Thomas is a girl!"

There was no insult attached. No slur. Just the sentence. Outside of those institutions, I was Emily. I stood there longer than I meant to. Not because I was afraid, and not because I was angry. I felt relief. After years of paperwork, administrators, and adults insisting on social categories that never fit, someone inside that institution had simply stated what was true.

It didn't stay contained. Of course it didn't. I was called to the principal's office within a day or two. The hallway smelled faintly of fresh paint that week; maintenance had just repainted several corridors, and the signs identifying offices had been removed and reattached with strips of sticky tape that were already curling at the edges. My biology had been documented long before this, and it was the first thing they reached for.

The principal talked for a long time about how I was being "too effeminate," about presentation and perception and discipline. He told me to get clothes that fit right. He told me to cut my hair short. He spoke as if tone could correct biology. To me it seemed unnecessary—why were we discussing this incident and blaming the victim? I sat still and let him finish.

He asked if I had any comments. I replied, "Yes. I think this school sucks, and I think my education would be better served if I were allowed to go home and be given a pre-determined budget for overdue library books."

He told me the meeting was done. There was no reaction. No response to what I'd said. Just a canned, prewritten dismissal that felt like I had interacted with a dial-up automated system.

I stood up, thanked him politely, and closed the door behind me. The adhesive holding the sign that read "Director Of The Middle School" peeled off with almost no resistance. I carried it down the hall and pressed it firmly onto the door of the boys' bathroom, smoothing it flat against the wood as if it had always belonged there. Then I walked away.

It didn't take long for the administration to notice. At lunch, the assistant headmaster approached me as I was walking in. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't summon me back to the office. He leaned in slightly and said, "I know you did it. I can't prove it. Nobody can. But we know it was you." There was something in his face—barely restrained humor, a flicker of recognition that he understood the precision of it. I knew he knew. He knew I knew. He kept it brief, nodded approvingly and moved on.

That moment has stayed with me longer than the lecture did. Not because I got away with something, but because for once, an adult authority figure saw the joke embedded in the structure. Saw that I was not chaotic or confused. I was deliberate. In a school that insisted on filing me incorrectly, I had simply relocated the label.