The Mormon Church Forced Me To Wear Dresses To Dances – And I Still Get Panic Attacks From It
Sitting in the audience at a recent Elliot Page event, 35 years later, I can hear my mom scolding me to keep my knees together.
By: Will Cole
A visceral wave of NO! stops me like a force field as I cross the threshold into the sanctuary. Legs shake, head floats, vision shrinks. A burning sensation creeps forward from the nape of my neck to engulf my face like a phantom hand tugging me down, suffocating me. The low thrum of hundreds of voices fades beneath the ocean waves beating in my ears.
My husband’s voice pierces through the haze, “—you okay?” The purple and green of his “Votes for Women” forearm tattoo come into awareness, his left arm extending to steady me. Or catch me. Josh’s Army instincts have their place. “Are you sick? What’s going on?”
“Um, I jus—nnn.” I flick my wrist to indicate forward movement. Whether to trick my legs into motion or to reassure Josh, I don’t know.
“Do we need to leave?” he says. I shake my head with tiny movements left and right. He interweaves his fingers with mine and leads me to a pew on the opposite side of the synagogue’s balcony. I’m aware he’s asking my opinion of the spot, but I only need to sit, and I can’t convince my mouth to form words. I just want to see Elliot. We came all this way. So many people. So many bodies. I gesture toward an empty spot at the end of a bench.
I’ve been excited for this Pride event: Elliot Page’s DC stop on the book tour for his memoir, Page Boy. My husband and I are both memoirists, trans, and Elliot fanboys since Juno, so we tolerated the $40 tickets, hour-long drive from Baltimore, and overpriced parking to hear him speak. The venue was unfamiliar to me: Sixth & I, a synagogue and event venue named after the intersection where it sits. After standing in line to claim our pre-signed copies, we ascended the stairs into balcony seating along with the dense crowd of transmascs and enbies with rainbow-dyed mullets and facial hair ranging from proud 13-year-old boy to Grizzly Adams.
“It’s not a great view of the screen. Or the stage,” Josh says.
I gesture again to the spot and show him my face, hoping he can read my distress, and we squeeze our hips in. The end of the bench equals easier escape. I inhale the hot, thick air. Exhale a piece of panic. Inhale the June heat suffused with body odor. Exhale towards a calm ocean breeze. How is there no AC? Inhale, exhale. I reach into my shorts pocket. Why didn’t I bring a fidget toy? I fish out my Loop earplugs and slip one into each ear, then place a hand on Josh’s leg to convey I’m okay. Okay enough.
The flashback hit as I crossed the double-door threshold into the sanctuary. Despite being a synagogue of gray stone, the sanctuary matched the interior structure of the wood-paneled-and-white Provo Tabernacle, a Mormon church building from 1898. Used for special, multi-congregational services, I squirmed in those wooden pews of the Tabernacle balcony dozens of times from age five into my early 20’s. During those decades when Utah was my home, the Tabernacle hosted my Mormon congregation plus several others for two-hour-long semi-annual regional conferences. No breaks, no snacks, no letting the little ones escape to kids’ Sunday School in a basement.
My mom, alone with seven kids in tow, was habitually late for church services. Knowing the ground floor would be full, she would shuffle us to one of the side staircases and to the balcony and search for a bench empty enough to squeeze us all in. My dad would have arrived early and sat up front, facing the congregation along with the other lay church leaders. I can’t recall a time Dad sat with us.
Sitting on a balcony pew at Sixth & I, my eyes roam across the crowd. Jamison, a local trans leader and acquaintance, gives a rousing introductory speech, and Josh says, “Hey, that’s our Jamison!” and I clap along with him. I reassure myself that I am among my people. That I am not that teenager forced to wear a dress, sitting up here exposed to the rest of the balcony congregants, my discomfort feeling like a spotlight shining on me alone. My modest mid-calf dresses would threaten to pull up too high, above my knees, just as my pastel-gay shorts are now pulling up and showing most of my hairy thighs.
I hear my mom’s voice hiss about sitting with my knees together and resent how my brothers never get scolded like this. Why can’t I wear pants to church? I lift my butt off the pew and grab the ends of my shorts in each fist and pull them down and forward. Josh checks in again, “You okay?” I nod. Thomas Page McBee, another trans man memoirist whose book I’ve read, introduces Elliot and begins their talk show interview-type conversation.
On the stage, Elliot discusses his dysphoria, his discomfort in women’s clothes, how playing women’s roles in his films echoes his playing a woman in real life. They discuss the Umbrella Academy scene when his character comes out as Viktor—a scene McBee helped write. I watched it when it aired, and cried for Viktor, for Elliot, for every transmasc like me getting their first affirming haircut. It’s been five years since mine; I was 38.
As I peer down to the stage area, I recall the church-condoned concerts the Provo Tabernacle also hosted: symphony orchestras and choirs signing the Hallelujah chorus and the like. For those concerts, Mom insisted I wear my Sunday best, since it was the Tabernacle, but I fought her on it. “It’s not church, Mom! It’s not Sunday!” I wore dresses only for the three hours of weekly church services. My dad jokes that the definition of a split second is how long it took me to change out of my Sunday clothes.
In high school, when I was 16—finally old enough to date—I attended a Wednesday evening concert at the Tabernacle with a boy I liked—and his family of eight. The boy and I sat in the highest pew and wrote notes to each other on the program, passing it back and forth. I was hoping he'd ask me to prom. Instead, I got a nosebleed.
I pinched my nose, tilted my head back, and hurried down the stairs of the upper seats, past the back pews, out the balcony’s threshold, and down the green-carpeted stairs to the girls’ room. I’d walked that route many times, absconding to the girls’ bathroom, taking any excuse to leave my unforgiving seat. Just like I did on the nosebleed date, I had to wear dresses for many non-church events. The photo below shows me all dolled up for a high school ‘girls’ choice’ semi-formal dance.