In the fall of 1998, I left New York and dropped straight into the Bible Belt. Rural West Virginia. A small college town where the air on Sunday morning was thick with hymns and everyone’s front porch had a flag—either American, Christian, or Confederate, depending on how honest they were.

I was nineteen. A lesbian. Intersex. From out of state and out of patience. It was a place where wearing a rainbow pin felt like a dare. Where people didn’t talk about things like queerness, and if they did, it was in whispers—right before they prayed about it in hopes of making it disappear.

I was the only student from New York that year. The only person who looked like she didn’t belong—and didn’t give a damn about blending in.

I walked onto campus with my EMS certifications in hand—New York and West Virginia both—and within days, I had a radio, a badge, and full authority. I wasn’t just taking classes. I was working shifts, pulling rescue duty, and training hard. People twice my age deferred to me on scene. I wasn’t impressive. I was necessary.

And yet, the university didn’t know what to do with me.

Because I was born intersex, they housed me in the boys’ dorm. That was their policy—penis equals male. No nuance. No discussion. I was even assigned female at birth, I’d lived my whole life as a girl, but they didn’t care. They assigned me to a room in a building full of men. The only compromise was that I got the room to myself. The numbers on the doors to my dorm rooms both ended in 13. A consolation prize for institutional cruelty.

I kept to myself. My presence made people nervous. I wasn’t trying to be anything but myself—but in a place like that, yourself is exactly what they hope you’ll keep hidden.

Some guys in the dorm were decent. Others stared too long or smirked when they passed me in the hall. They didn’t know what to make of me—a tall, tattooed, masculine woman with a quiet mouth and a sharp stare who didn’t flinch when they muttered behind my back.

I used to wake up to notes taped to my dorm door—anonymous, crooked, scribbled on notebook paper and torn bulletin scraps. They weren’t threats exactly, just thin-lipped reminders. Slippery little messages that said, in so many words, “A queer lives here.” Like I didn’t already know. Like they thought their silence during the day gave them permission to whisper through walls at night.

I never responded. Not at first. I let them pile up. Week after week, the messages kept coming. Maybe they thought they were being clever. Maybe they thought shame came in paper form. But I didn’t flinch. I saved every single one—smoothed them out, stacked them neatly, filed them like evidence.

And then one morning, I posted all of them—taped to the outside of my door. At the center of it all, I added my own note. Sharpie. All caps.

Yes, I’m aware that I’m a lesbian (and female) living in the boys’ dorm. We all like women here. Get the fuck over it.
—Emily

After that? Silence. Not the heavy, bitter kind that came before—but the kind you get when people realize you’re not going anywhere. Not quietly. Not ever.

Professors were worse. Some wouldn’t speak to me at all. One dropped me from her roster without a word. Another handed back an assignment I’d written about rescue work and said he couldn’t, quote, “in good conscience grade something with that kind of perspective.” I didn’t ask what kind. I already knew.

I didn’t go to that school to make friends. I went there to work. And work, I did.

Every weekend, I trained. Sun-up to sun-down, Saturday and Sunday. I was enrolled in a master-level rescue course with over forty contact hours. Rope work. Tactical bailout. Hostage scenarios. Confined space. High-angle everything. I was nineteen and already leading a team of five in simulation drills, and also as their supervisor during event coverage. While other students slept off hangovers, I was tying figure eights in heavy gloves before dawn.

One weekend, I hitchhiked to tac medic training because no one offered me a ride and I wasn’t about to let that stop me. I stood on the side of a West Virginia highway with my blue medic bag over my shoulder with paperwork folded in half and sticking out the back pocket. I was there all day—ran every drill they threw at me, shot a tight group with a .45, and passed. Then I stuck my thumb back out and somehow made it back to campus.

There was a church-run coffee shop off campus. I walked in the following morning wearing a denim jacket with a tiny rainbow pin. Everyone stopped talking. The woman behind the counter asked if I needed directions. I said, “No ma’am, just coffee.” She stood there staring at me, with an almost full pot of coffee in her right hand, but didn’t pour it. I left. That was my welcome.

I didn’t talk much that year. I wrote. I trained. I moved through spaces like a ghost with a pulse. I didn’t stay long. Two years. The rescue training was the only thing that made it tolerable. The isolation, though—it started to feel like rot. I wasn’t going to shrink just to survive. I wasn’t built for closeting or code-switching or fake smiles. I left not because I couldn’t hack it, but because I knew my worth.

I didn’t go to college to be accepted. I went to get trained. And goddamn, did I ever.