“I was never meant for smallness, never meant to be quiet, never meant to fit inside the lines someone else drew.” These words, raw and resolute, capture the essence of Emily Pratt Slatin, a former firefighter and paramedic lieutenant, skilled photographer, and unflinchingly honest writer whose life has been defined by her refusal to compromise her identity.
Born intersex with XX chromosomes, Slatin’s sense of self was challenged from day one. Despite her parents’ stubborn refusal to accept her identity, she remained steadfast in who she was. “I was Emily when I looked in the mirror… when I introduced myself to strangers,” she shares candidly on her personal blog, RescueGirl557.
At 16, medical confirmation of her female genetics triggered what she describes as a family “tribunal” where relatives condemned her identity. Rather than surrendering her sense of self, she made the gut-wrenching yet decisive choice to walk away. This moment marked both tremendous loss and an unexpected beginning.
Thrown into independence as a teenager, Slatin somehow managed to create a life entirely on her own terms. By 18, she had earned her EMT certification and joined a local fire department. Her career in emergency services would span two decades, during which she became renowned for handling rescue situations “that most people couldn’t stomach,” as she puts it with characteristic understatement.
“I carry a storm inside me,” Slatin writes in one particularly moving post, eventually concluding, “I am the storm… the woman who cannot be contained. And I would not change a damn thing.” This metaphor of internal turbulence appears repeatedly in her writing, representing both the pain of her experiences and the power she’s drawn from them. Rather than attempting to suppress her intensity—which others often found uncomfortable—Slatin has gradually learned to claim it as strength.
The emotional toll of witnessing countless tragedies eventually led her to step away from emergency services. She transitioned to a quieter but equally determined form of self-reliance: homesteading on her Vermont property, where she takes immense pride in maintaining her land and home with “blistered hands” that speak to her daily labor.
“Every square inch of this life is mine,” she writes with evident satisfaction, emphasizing the profound significance of creating a world where no one questions her worth or her right to exist as herself.
After surviving a nearly two-decade relationship that had slowly grown increasingly unhealthy, Slatin found transformative love with her wife, Amelia. Their connection began through a serendipitous online exchange of writing and developed into what Slatin describes as “love as easy, and as necessary, as breathing.”
When both women faced harsh rejection from their families—Amelia for coming out as transgender, Slatin for her identity—they created something remarkable: “We stitched a new family out of the thin air around us, made stronger precisely because it was chosen, not assigned.”
Their marriage embraces openness and mutual freedom, with Slatin explaining, “Love isn’t about possession – it’s about freedom, about trust, about choosing to stay when leaving would be easier.” This relationship represents the first time in Slatin’s life that she has been fully accepted for exactly who she is, without conditions or caveats.
Despite not having supportive parents herself, she somehow found the capacity to become a parent figure to her former partner’s niece, “showing up to the after-school events… packing lunches… being both the mother and father figure.” Years later, when that young woman, now grown, needed help at 2 AM, Slatin didn’t hesitate for a second—demonstrating her bone-deep belief that true family is defined by consistent care and understanding, not genetics or paperwork.
Mentored by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg in her youth (a detail she mentions almost in passing), Slatin approaches writing as both art and survival. “Prose is what kept me alive,” she reveals about her darkest nights. Her writing style blends blunt realism with poetic depth, creating a voice that is simultaneously tough and vulnerable, much like the woman herself.
In confrontational pieces like “An Open Letter to My Mom,” she addresses her mother directly: “You are wrong about who I am… There was no ‘sex change.’ There was no ‘transition.’ There was only a girl—me—born as your daughter.”
“There are nights I still ache, sure. Grief doesn’t disappear just because you refuse to unpack it,” Slatin acknowledges with a sigh almost audible between the lines. Her writing doesn’t shy away from the lasting impact of childhood rejection, professional burnout, and relationship dissolution.
Yet her story ultimately conveys something unexpectedly hopeful: hope in finding love that accepts you fully, hope in creating family from scratch, hope in the healing found in nature and honest work, and hope in being understood after feeling alone for so damn long.
Today, on her Vermont property with its quiet mornings and star-filled nights, she finds profound satisfaction in simple physicality—”the scent of cut grass, the buzz of voltage in clean conduit, the feel of a wrench in [her] hand”—suggesting that sometimes healing comes through tangible connection to the world around us, through the certainty of things that can be built, fixed, or grown.
“The stories they told about me are irrelevant now… my story will still stand. Not carved in marble, but lived in moments… and the quiet, unbreakable joy of being whole in my own skin,” Slatin writes in what might be her most powerful statement of self-acceptance.
As she puts it with characteristic directness in a recent post: “I didn’t need happy. I needed honest. And that is exactly what I finally have.”
Through her writing on RescueGirl557 and her photography portfolio, Emily Pratt Slatin offers not just her personal story, but a testament to the resilience of the human spirit—a reminder that authenticity, however difficult the path, remains the surest route to peace. In a world increasingly filled with carefully curated personas, her unfiltered voice stands as a rare and necessary beacon for those still finding their way home to themselves.
