The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ temples are simultaneously monumentally visible and overtly private, split between the sky-scraping steeples of the exterior edifice and the sacred liturgies of its interior mysteries. To a critic’s gaze, the temple is at once too big and bright as well as too secretive and cloistered. It should be built smaller and less apparent yet also operated openly and more transparent. A temple asks for privacy for what goes on within it at the same time that it asks for acknowledgment of what it is based on how it looks without. A temple asks that the world sees its sacred meaning at the same time that it tries to protect its ordinances from anti-Mormon demeaning.
When I came out as a transgender woman, I felt simultaneously irrevocably visible and desperately private. My life was split between the unmissably sudden switch in my wardrobe from pantsuits to long skirts and the unsatisfiable urge I had to slip under the radar and avoid others’ attention. It hurt when some strangers’ eyes glazed past my dresses and regarded me as a man, and it hurt just as much when others sometimes asked questions that I didn’t think were their business, like if I’d had surgeries or taken medications. I wanted the world to see my gender expression at the same time that I didn’t want transphobes to surveil my gender transgression.
Latter-day Saints say the human body is a temple. I wanted to turn that on its head and imagine the temple as a human body.
When I did, I realized it reminded me of no body so much as my own.
The Temple Is a Transgender Woman
They whisper about my granite skirts
Wondering what’s beneath
My signs and pronouns they ignore
That’s just my false belief
They shake their heads at how I dare
To do my hair in steeples
I ought to cut it short they say
Long hair’s for Christian people
They gasp in horror when I ask
To get dressed on their street
How dare I force the passersby
My garish flesh to see
They sneak their cameras up my skirts
They breach my marble clothes
They show their pictures to the world
In books and films and shows
They tell me that the world deserves
To know the real me
They tell me this is only caused
By my own secrecy
They tell me I’m revolting
They tell me I’m a freak
They tell me everything that I
Already thought of me
I hide behind my concrete skirts
My steeples worn like masks
I shrink inside the neighborhoods
Too big to hide or pass
I squirm and squeeze into my robes
I tear down my own walls
I bare my innards to the world
As if they cared at all
Makoto Hunter researches
the cultural and legal history
of the United States
at UC Santa Barbara.
