Of the moment

Mar 31

A story about a timely matter

31, March 2026

Doors by Ellen D. B. Riggle

I enter the Shaker Village East Family Dwelling, built in 1817, through the singular wooden cellar door on the backside and traverse a long, brightly lit hallway. Because I visit the restored buildings and farm frequently, I ignore the informational plaques as I walk through the uninhabited space toward the restroom, discreetly tucked underneath the large limestone and red brick building at the end of the village road and often devoid of people.

If I use the main front entrance of the four-story dormitory style household, originally constructed by members of the utopian sect with celibate separation of the sexes in mind, I must choose between the door on the left for men and the door on the right for women. There are no labels or present-day mandates for segregated use – it’s simply a fact known to those versed in local Shaker history. Given the mid-1700’s English Protestant roots of the group, they would not have conceived of any need for a middle sex door.

In the cellar, modern public restrooms are located under the historically sex segregated staircases. These doors are marked Women and Men, and life-size cardboard cutout, black-and-white vintage portraits of a woman in a long Shaker dress and a man in pants and white shirt with a vest, respectively.

Hearing the cellar door open behind me, I glance back to see an older man entering the exhibit space.

At end of the hall, I find the doors of the restrooms propped open, obscuring both the signs and pictures from view. Three burly men exit what I know is designated as the women’s restroom. Recognizing their Village maintenance uniforms, I inquire whether the facility is available for use. They assure me everything is functional, explaining they are checking water pressure in the building, before disappearing through an adjacent Employees Only door.

I enter the spacious women’s restroom area, stone walls painted bright white, with one stall straight ahead and a second stall and lavatory to the left. I take a left turn to the sink to wash my hands.

As I lather with soap, the older man from the exhibit space enters the restroom, walking directly into the unoccupied stall straight ahead. I’ve heard men do not make eye contact or talk in the restroom, and indeed he does not glance my way.

I run through options in my mind.

I could clear my throat and loudly announce, “This is the ladies’ room,” a proclamation I hear frequently when I enter a women’s restroom. Having observed three large men exiting and what he likely perceived as a chap entering, the visitor naturally assumes this is the men’s facility. In all fairness, in hiking boots, baseball cap, dark blue jacket and cargo pants, I resemble the maintenance fellas far more than the temporarily hidden matronly guardian of the restroom door. My emphatic pronouncement would clear up the confusion – or might add to it, and, after we sort out the mix-up, likely cause the older man intense embarrassment.

Or, I could demand to see his birth certificate. Maybe this is a trans man ordered by law, under threat of prosecution, to use the women’s restroom. If he doesn’t carry the original document on his person, I will settle for a driver’s license. Surely there is a hotline number for citizen restroom police to call and verify whether a license has been invalidated by misguided legislators.

Or, if he were a septuagenarian man mistakenly wandering into a women’s restroom in Kansas, I could collect an easy thousand-dollar bounty by capturing the presumed dangerous creature. But we are not in Kansas, and he is not the type of restroom occupant who frightens me.

In this two-century-old dwelling, built with one vision of utopia, I bestow the simple gift of my version of a utopian community, based on kindness and compassion, and stand sentinel in the hallway, re-reading Shaker history, while the human being behind the stall door is left to pee in peace.

Ellen D. B. Riggle is an award winning scholar, educator, and author. Their essays and poems have recently appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Earth's Daughters, New Verse News, Rise Up Review, Sinister Wisdom, and Writer's Resist. They are an Executive Producer of the short documentary, Becoming Myself: Positive Trans and Nonbinary Identities.

meagan cohen