Lost in Trans-Lation

Part title

Alright, Oliver, just one more deep breath, come on now, you can do this.  As if talking to myself wasn't weird or anything, but at least I managed to keep myself from having a panic attack. That'd be just what I needed right now, forty-five minutes to Thanksgiving dinner and I'd nearly had a panic attack. Some holiday this was shaping up to be. I didn't like what I saw in the mirror, mostly the dress. Dresses always made me so uncomfortable. I had to wear it though, I wasn't Oliver here, I was Alyssa. I wasn't a boy, I was a girl. What respect I got at school for who I was, for every teacher and classmate who called me Oliver, for every dress shirt, pants, jeans, binder, and pair of boxers I owned, there were holidays home where my clothes, my real clothes went with friends to be kept safe and I was forced into a role I hated, a girl, wearing dresses and high heel shoes and makeup. I smoothed the front of the dress down one more time with a hate filled glare at the curves on my chest. Then I straightened up, pushed my shoulders back, chin up, and walked out of my room and into the madness.

"Alyssa, can you put these on the table?"

"Alyssa, can you pour the water into the glasses?

"Oh Alyssa, dear, it's so good to see you back from college, how's your semester been?"

"Alyssa, get the celery and olives out, there's a plate for them there."

"Alyssa, get the door for your grandmother."

"Alyssa..."

"Sweetie..."

"Have you heard about that man who died a few days ago?" It was a woman, she had her identity destroyed by her parents and was forced back into the gender she had been assigned at birth.

"Did you hear about Michael Phelps boyfriend?"

"She is his girlfriend," I said through grit teeth.

"Well that's not true in the slightest, she was born a boy," my dad said.

"Actually she was born intersex and the doctors decided to say she was male," I said.

"As well they should have," my aunt said. Lovely woman, horribly judgmental. "Honestly, all this nonsense about gender being entirely social. It's nonsense. God made us male and female, no hermaphrodites."

Yeah, well God made me too, and I'm not a girl in spite of the dress you insist I wear since you all still think I'm a woman. It wasn't worth arguing, they would never understand, and it wasn't worth telling them, I didn't want to lose my home and college tuition. One day I would be free.

And there was the doorbell. I ran myself ragged doing all of these tasks and there was the doorbell. I could see through the window that it was my guest of honor.

"I've got it!" I called out and opened the door to a wonderful pair of arms hugging me.

"Hey Oliver," Chris, my amazing boyfriend, whispered into my ear. I melted. Yeah, this was weird for both of us, me in a dress with a curved chest, but together we were home. This building, this family, they weren't my home, they were a place I survived, but in Chris's arms, I was finally home and it would be alright.