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.

My Own Understanding Of Myself Had Remained Remarkably Consistent

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

I had a good night's sleep and an entire day to myself for the first time in quite a while. There was nowhere I needed to be. I woke up feeling rested, made my coffee, and realized that I could spend the entire day doing whatever I wanted. I decided to work on my engineering.

Lately, I've been feeling nostalgic for my twenties. It was the first period of my life when I experienced genuine independence. I was young, curious, occasionally reckless, and entirely convinced that the world was worth seeing, even if I couldn't always afford to see very much of it.

I remember being twenty years old, working my third year as a counselor at summer camp in the Adirondacks. On my first day off, I had three reasonable choices for somewhere to go—Plattsburgh, Montreal, or Malone. I chose Plattsburgh, mostly because it was somewhere I could go for the day without having to make any elaborate arrangements.

I got into my car and drove there. I didn't have much money, certainly not enough to afford a hotel room, and camp had specifically instructed me not to return until a certain time. Rather than spend money I didn't have, I quietly returned to the property, parked the car in a hidden location, and pitched a tent somewhere I wasn't supposed to be.

I didn't know it then, but a couple of years later, I would move to Long Island for two years, then Plattsburgh for awhile. Angie and I would spend nearly twenty years together, and the next two decades would unfold in ways I couldn't possibly have imagined while driving around town on that ordinary afternoon.

There was a woman named Nyla who used to visit my mother when I was little. She lived somewhere in the Midwest and worked at a textile factory. I never knew exactly where she lived, and her visits were unpredictable. Sometimes she would appear after several months, sometimes after several years. She would stay for a few days or a week, and then she'd disappear again.

Then we moved to Stamford, and she flew into the Albany airport where mom and I picked her up in the family station wagon. She left a few days later, promising that she would come and visit again soon. She never returned.

Before Mom died, we talked about Nyla. Mom told me that she was a lesbian who never married, never settled down, and generally lived according to whatever she wanted or needed at the time. I adored Nyla when I was a child, long before I understood much about her personal life. She seemed to move through the world with an independence that I desperately wanted for myself.

When she visited around Christmas, she sometimes brought me things from the textile factory. One year it was a shoebox full of assorted buttons that would otherwise have been discarded. Another year it was a plain cardboard box containing bundles of decorative lace intended for girls' clothing.

Those gifts didn't cost her anything, but they meant enormously to me. My father wanted a son, and he made this expectation clear to me.

I hated the holidays because my father would get more drunk than usual and then say that all he wanted for Christmas was to finally have a son. My birth certificate has identified me as female from the beginning. My mother named me Emily Sarah Pratt Slatin and raised me as her daughter from the day I was born.

Dad subsequently changed my recorded name to Thomas Wilson Pratt Slatin and attempted to raise me according to his expectations, despite the circumstances of my birth. He enrolled me in schools and summer camp under a boy's name, insisted that I present myself as male, and treated my failure to conform as disobedience. My mother and my friends all knew me as Emily.

The name Thomas followed me into adulthood until I parted with my late fathers estate and was able to finally change my name legally.

I used the buttons and lace to modify my clothing, adding small embellishments that made my clothes look more like those worn by my friends.

My father spent considerable amounts of money on schools, summer camps, tutors, computers, and whatever else he thought might help produce the son he believed he should have. He interpreted my self-identification as a female as being a personal attack against him and his life goals.

I have never regarded my intersex biology as a mistake. Even now, when people express sympathy for the circumstances of my birth or ask whether I had my anatomy surgically corrected, I find myself wondering why they assume that something unusual must necessarily be something unfortunate.

I regard my female intersexed body as a gift from nature. I have never wanted surgery to make it conform to someone else's expectations, and I cannot imagine voluntarily destroying something I have always considered part of what makes me who I am.

I find it remarkable how much of my life was complicated by other people's assumptions about my body, particularly when my own understanding of myself had remained remarkably consistent.

At five this morning, Maddie sent me a video clip of the view over the airplane wing on her flight to Rome. She and I texted about the toddler who was screaming the entire time. I replied and let her know that I would have requested a parachute and directions to the nearest airport where I would have a good chance at booking a different flight.

I went back to sleep for a little while longer, and woke up as the sun was beginning to rise. Living on an old dairy farm in Vermont means you learn to read the signs of the year winding down. The light changes first. It loses its weight, stretching out thin and pale across the ridge line.

The trees were bare, but not embarrassed. Nature has never confused exposure with shame.

I have never understood the appeal of a perfectly maintained lawn. Grass is an extraordinarily successful organism. It has survived millions of years without my assistance, and I see no reason to interfere with its ambitions.

In other words, the wheel fell off the mower deck again and I've lost the ambition to repair it and then mow the lawn till next spring. The grass hasn't grown much this season, and I think I mowed the lawn twice. It will probably be fine till spring. Probably.

I texted good morning love to Amelia when I made my morning coffee. She replied with an annoyed emoji with a photo of the broken window blinds at her house that were stuck at a bizarre angle, and asked if I could fix them next time I come over. I said of course. Problem is, I won't be back to Buffalo until early December.

Today I stayed home and worked on my engineering. I looked through site surveys, shopped for components, and got caught up on the group message board. It was part practical engineering, part theories of things I want to build that might be possible. The Meshtastic project for CARN in Middletown Springs that I'm the lead engineer for is going well, despite constantly being on the very edge of government approval and actual construction.

People who say money cannot buy happiness have clearly never walked into a hardware store knowing exactly which obscure fitting they need and discovered there is one left.

There are people who solve problems, people who explain why problems cannot be solved, and people who schedule meetings so both groups can discuss the differences between the two. Somewhere in America, there is a folding chair that has attended more municipal meetings than any elected official.

I find it comforting that the stars remain completely unimpressed by human bureaucracy. Somewhere beneath Orion, somebody is filling out a duplicate form because the first department cannot accept the form required by the second department. Orion continues doing Orion stuff. To get around the bureaucracy, I've simply volunteered my time and materials and built a lot of the infrastructure myself. Then I installed the repeater nodes to satisfy private landowner requests. It has worked extremely well thus far.