Guest Post: Treating My Garment Dysmorphia

by Mags Edvalson

I’m fat. Let’s just get it out of the way, because it’s a fact of life I have to accept every day. I just am. I always have been, and I probably always will be. My whole family is fat, or extraordinarily tall or extraordinarily tall and fat. That includes all my four dozen cousins. We are great Scandinavian giants whose ancestors may as well have been the inspiration behind the Jötnar in Norse mythology. I am, at 5’9” and between 250 and 300 lbs, the small one in my family. My brothers are both close to 6’7” and well over 300 lbs. Fatness, you could say, is my jam.

Of course I hate it. As a teenager I took it on as my solemn responsibility to cover up my body to keep it from offending others. This only ever seemed to accentuate the issue when it came to things like combined youth activities at a pool or large body of water where I grew up in California. Of course all the girls were expected to wear modest bathing suits, but I was the only one who wore an oversized T-shirt and my brother’s extra long swim trunks. I didn’t need to do that, but it seemed that whether I did or not, I still caught glimpses of the boys glancing over and giggling at me. The other girls ignored me. One of my Young Women’s presidents suggested I would be so pretty if I just lost some weight.

I thought garments would be the great equalizer. I remember trying to justify my extra effort to be modest as simply being better prepared to wear them. I wore long skirts to cover my unsightly calves. I camouflaged my “Relief Society arms” with long sleeves year round, even in triple digit temperatures. How bad could garments possibly be after years of enduring extra layers because I believed my very being was offensive?

I was endowed three months before my mission to Louisiana. At my mother’s advice, I bought tops and bottoms in several fabrics and styles to decide which ones I liked best, but it was useless. I hated them all. I took extra long showers in those months leading up to my first day in the MTC. Being alone and nude was the only time I felt comfortable and okay. Upon leaving the shower, I’d stand wrapped in my towel staring at my neatly folded top and bottom and sob quietly at the prospect of putting them on again.

Garments, as it turns out, are just as awful as most any other type of clothing when you’re fat. No matter how long I’d get the bottoms, they would always ride up my leg. You could always tell where they hit my thigh under my jeans, leaving a dent that only hinted at the itchy red line they left behind. The tops were never so bad for me, but I can imagine they’d be awful for other body types. The tops with cups are an absolute must have for me, but the poor design of the hem on the tops lends them to rolling up and over bigger guts. It’s near impossible to keep anything tucked in.

Historically, plus-sized clothing has been designed by and for straight-sized people who figure that simply adding a few inches in either direction at the waist will be enough to fit. Lane Bryant has been the brand associated with bigger women for over a century, and even then it only started out as a maternity line on the assumption that extra weight on women is only ever temporary. I remember being twelve years old and having to “graduate” to Lane Bryant, whose clothing always trended towards mature and business casual. My mom was upset that she had to pay extra money for jeans that would only tear at the knees in six months. I was mortified because I was dressing like my grandmother.

It’s only been within the last decade or so that plus-sized women could find trendy clothing made for them by other plus-sized women. As a young adult I was confined to Lane Bryant and Torrid, and it’s only been since 2022 when Old Navy expanded their jean selection to include sizes that fit my body that I’ve been able to buy jeans from a straight-sized store. Online shops like Bloomchic have finally made fashions I like accessible to me, and shopping is no longer a chore. Garments, on the other hand, are still made by one company and designs are signed off on by straight-sized old men who are all mostly married to straight-sized women and have probably never considered what wearing clothes as a fat woman is like.

I served a mission at a time when options for my body were still limited to a few stores. I put in an extra effort to make sure my skirts were at least mid calf or longer, and my sleeves were at least a quarter length. The church had just started to encourage sister missionaries to wear more fashionable clothing by relaxing the dress code. It was said that this was done to attract more investigators after polls had shown that the dress code was a turn off. No matter, I was going to follow those old rules because modesty had become a coping mechanism.

Despite this, I became a target for ridicule by one of the senior sister missionaries in my MTC zone. Sunday lunches made the cafeteria particularly crowded as zones were joined by their branch presidencies and wives. We had to squeeze in at our table to make room, and I was joined by one of the councilor’s wives to my left. She was a rail thin woman with that stereotypical sternness that one associates with school marms in old movies. As I held my elbows close to my body, I struggled to maneuver my utensils from plate to mouth.

Suddenly, I felt her lean in and heard her whisper, “You really ought to be careful about your modesty, Sister Olsen, or the elders might start thinking impure thoughts.”  I almost dropped my fork. I looked down at my blouse, which was a button-up with a tank top underneath. Only the top button was undone, and yet with how tightly packed we were at the table, my cleavage was reaching my clavicle. I didn’t feel so much embarrassed as I felt furious. I glared back at the woman, but I was speechless. I looked around at the other sisters. They all had blouses with lower necklines, but no visible cleavage because they were all A or B cupped, including the sister who chastised me.

After so many years of trying to hide my body and go above and beyond in my modesty to make up for being fat, that was the first moment that I realized that there is no room in the church for fat people. Garments emphasize this fact by their poor fit on diverse bodies, as well as the false sense of security that modesty provides. They were designed to remind us of our covenants to remain chaste, and yet at one slip of the cleavage, my internalized devotion was questionable. Though I was accustomed to feeling unwanted, I hadn’t realized until then that part of that status included the assumption that my body was undesirable because it was too sexual. It was a devastating and very confusing moment, and I hated myself as much as I hated that senior sister. Being fat is not ideal, but hating yourself for something you can’t necessarily change let alone quickly is far worse.

So many opinions have been shared about the new garment changes. I am happy that there are women celebrating. I love the criticisms being voiced about the lack of consideration for vaginal health. Most of all I feel deeply betrayed along with those who feel that this change does not address the culture of shame that the church has facilitated against women’s bodies. Particularly, I want to point out how much this change in the garment top exacerbates the layers of shame that fat women have for not only being female, but also embodying the paradox of undesirability and hypersexualization. As straight-sized women revel in showing off their now temple worthy shoulders, many fat women will still hesitate. Dare they own their arms and risk offending the brethren with some extra skin and jiggle? Or do they persist in wearing longer sleeves and face the ridicule anyway? Nobody, no matter their size, should have to think twice about their own comfort.

Finally, I have a confession to make. I don’t wear garments anymore. That’s actually not the confession. It’s just a fact that I don’t feel shame for. If my story of crying in the bathroom at having to put garments on was any indication, I definitely hated wearing garments. The confession is that I wore garments for years after leaving the church. I endured several extra years of yeast infections, itchy red welts on my thighs, uncomfortable bunching, and worst of all shame of my body, because I could not bear the idea that I could be fat and beautiful. While women who leave the church often share pictures of their “porn shoulders” with pride, I could not allow my gross body to be seen.

It wasn’t until I partnered up with my now spouse that I stopped wearing them. It wasn’t that I was embarrassed to have to explain my weird underwear to my partner. He was a non-member raised by former members with plenty of active family. We’d been friends in college and he’d written to me on my mission. If anything, he would be the most understanding of my journey. I stopped wearing garments for myself because I realized that for all that pressure I placed on myself for protecting other people, I was depriving myself of my own love. If this other person that I adored could love my fat body, then why couldn’t I?

It was still several years before I threw my garments out. It was moving day, and we were down to the wire to get the house locked up and the last of the odds and ends out. The old trash bag of garments was one of the last things to go. In my exhaustion and frustration at the day, I stared down that bag and felt the weight of all those bathroom moments over again. This time I did not cry. Instead, I picked up the bag, carried it to the dumpster, and with a scream of rage and release, I slammed the bag down inside and dropped the lid.

I’m fat. I hate it, but I won’t be ashamed of it anymore.

From the time Mags Edvalson learned to read, they’ve had an obsession with church history and the paranormal. This fixation is what drives them as a folklorist and a church historian for the Community of Christ, which has been their church home since 2017. Mags lives in picturesque S ilverton, Oregon with their spouse and an menagerie of furry children.