‘I’m not here to police your thoughts. I’m here to be alive’: A candid conversation about Pride Month with Douglas Peterson

QUINCY —  Douglas Peterson, former president of the TriState Diversity Coalition and owner of State Street Theater, recently spoke with Muddy River News about the meaning of Pride Month and the local LGBTQ experience.

Peterson, a transgender woman who uses she/her pronouns, spoke authentically of her earliest experiences with gender dysphoria, finding unlikely solace in “The Jerry Springer Show” and the intention behind keeping her birth name and refraining from “passing.” 

The interview was enlightening, thought-provoking and raw — the kind that’s best when shared in full instead of picking out a quote or two.

Editor’s note: The transcript for this interview has been modified for clarity, conciseness and relevance.

Aspen Gengenbacher: How long have you been involved with TriState Diversity Coalition?

Douglas Peterson: Four years now. 

AG: And are you from Quincy?

DP: I am not. I’m from St. Charles, Mo. I grew up there, went to college in Houston, back to St. Louis for law school and then lived in Boston for 10 years before moving here. 

AG: What brought you here?

DP: It’s complicated.

AG: Isn’t it always for everybody that finds themselves here? 

DP: It’s a complicated story, but it’s good. Here I am. I moved here about six years ago. 

AG: Have you always identified as transgender?

DP: Always? Always is kind of a weird word … This happens a lot in the queer community. People live an experience in their own head, and then only later do they get the words to describe the feelings. The words exist, but if they’re not taught to you, you just feel weird or outcast … So, was I always transgender? Yeah, I was. From the age of 3 onward, I always wanted to be a girl. There are ways of describing that, but when you live in a really Catholic household with very strict norms and morals, it’s very hard to express it because you know that even expressing it would get you in trouble.

That’s also why you find that there’s a lot of late-in-life transition, because folks don’t realize that they have words and that there are words to describe (their experience) and don’t fully understand that what they’re feeling is dysphoria … It’s very hard to identify dysphoria while you’re experiencing it, because it requires you to not only know what is right but also that what you’re feeling is wrong or that what you’re feeling is not what everyone else is feeling … It’s kind of the same sort of thing with depression, right? You just think that everyone’s dealing with the same things, everyone’s feeling the same way. You think that’s a normal thing. I don’t know if this is everybody’s experience. It’s certainly my experience.


You kind of have to choose. Do you want to go down the pathway of being transgender, or do you not? You don’t know what the future would hold if you are transgender, other than you know that you’ll be labeled a pariah and that people will actively discriminate against you. That’s the one known if you transition. It will not be easy for you. 
Then you have the other known, which is your current state of feeling dysphoria all of the time — feeling discomfort, all of the time … You have to choose which one you want:
 This stable life that you’re currently living with dysphoria, or this unknown future that you know will be painful in some way. It is a choice.
 There’s a lot of narrative that it’s not a choice, but it really is. You’re actively choosing to accept who you are and the way for you to live, such that you don’t feel so indescribably bad all the time. 

When I lived in Boston, I was out to all of my friends. Everyone knew who I was, and it was OK … When we decided to move to Quincy, I had to take all of that, box it up and say, “When we move, I don’t know if this is going to be a safe space.” That was kind of weird, too, having to go from being out to being back in the closet to ensure that safety. That was tough. October of 2020 is when I “came out.” I didn’t really have a traditional coming-out narrative. I just stopped pretending.

One of the things I thought about when I was faced with my two different choices of status quo or transitioning, I didn’t want to attempt to pass. “Passing” is the term for when you distance yourself from your former self to become your new self and just pretend or attempt to be only perceived as female. Passing is very helpful because when you pass, you don’t get some of the violent feedback from other people. People who are actively anti-transgender folks will harass you, and harassment sucks, especially for trans women but also for trans men. Passing really matters because it limits the amount of harassment you have to deal with in life. When I chose to transition, I decided that I wasn’t going to try to pass. I was going to do the exact opposite … One of the ways that I thought I could help other people was simply by being visible. “Hey, here I am. I’m normal. I look like this. It is what it is.” 

“If I can get just one kid to be proud of the weirdo that they are as a kid and to just let it ride so that they don’t have to feel bad about themselves later in life — that’s a win, and that’s why Pride is important.“

Douglas Peterson

I do think that I help people in that way, especially being an active business owner downtown, being someone who is doing stuff. I do find that it does hinder my business. For instance, I have people who have actively told me, “Oh, we won’t support that business” — they didn’t know that they were talking to me — “because they do things with the gays.” “They’re owned by that weirdo.” I get that. I don’t like it, but you just roll with it, right? 

AG: You said that before you had moved here, you were mentally preparing and saying to yourself, “I don’t know if this is going to be a safe space.” Looking at the community as a whole, how would you say that you have been treated? 

DP: It’s been really good. I would say that I love Quincy. First of all, I fell in love with the city within the first year I was here. It is amazing. The downtown is incredible. The architecture is amazing. The people are really welcoming… Even when I interact with some really conservative folks, they give me a little bit of a side-eye, and then they work with me, and they’re like, “Oh, she knows what she’s doing, so we’re just gonna roll with it.” Do they always get my pronouns right? No. Do they always get my name right? No, because I go by Douglas … I intentionally didn’t change my name, in part because it was another way to be flagged for visibility.

I did have a man try to pick a fight with me at Oktoberfest in 2021 or 2022. I had my friends there, and I had Mike Hathaway — the bartender at Ratskeller. I was like, “Hey, Mike, why don’t you just stand right there and look at me for a little bit.” He’s like, “Why would I do that? We’re busy.” “Mike, just do it.” “OK, cool.” This guy’s trying to fight me, and he’s like, “You know, you’re not really a woman.” And I was like, “I don’t really care.” That’s the single instance of someone actively trying to harass me, and it wasn’t terribly terrifying. It was just very confusing. 

More than anything else, I get folks that look at me funny … That doesn’t feel good, that feeling of not feeling accepted. That is, in fact, dysphoria. That’s actually a really good example for someone who doesn’t have gender dysphoria to understand what it might feel like — when you walk in and you immediately feel like you’re not wanted. Everyone’s experienced that. That’s not just a transgender thing. You’ve walked into places where you’re like, “Oh, I’m not supposed to be here.” I get that a little bit at some places — places that are less accepting.

Owners of businesses set the tenor for the establishment, so when you have a lot of business owners who don’t care about that particular thing, it establishes the standard for how we treat people who are queer or are visibly different. If we treat everybody with kindness and respect, then the people who are in attendance will also treat you with kindness and respect, even if their brain is somewhere else. That’s kind of the vibe I get from most places in Quincy — “We’re not here for pushing people away.” That’s a unifying characteristic of Quincy that I appreciate a lot.

AG: Why does Pride Month matter? Why should the LGBTQ community be recognized? Why is it such a big deal?

DP: If you ask a thousand different queer folks about the importance of Pride, you’ll get a thousand different answers. So this is my answer — and I’m probably going to cry. There’s a reason why it’s called “pride.” … Most folks who are in the queer community have had some kind of backlash in one way or the other, whether it be losing friends or being told that you’re wrong or immoral or you’re lesser than. When you get told that you’re lesser than, you become lesser than.

When I was first coming out, I really struggled with the term “pride” because why would I be proud of being less than? I certainly am not proud of being broken. No one’s proud to be broken, but that’s why they use the word “pride” because you’re not broken. You’re you. I want people to know that it’s OK to be who you are. There’s nothing wrong, and it’s OK to be proud to be you, because you are special. … I still don’t like the term “pride,” and that’s weird, because even now, I want it to be called “pride.” I want to feel proud to be who I am, but I’m not. That’s f***ed up, man.

If I can get just one kid to be proud of the weirdo that they are as a kid, and to just let it ride so that they don’t have to feel bad about themselves later in life — that’s a win, and that’s why Pride is important. It’s about repairing the feelings that you have about yourself. It’s about awareness to others that when you demean a group, you actually make their lives worse. … That’s what it means to me. It means taking ownership of who you are and just rolling with it and feeling OK.

AG: If you would’ve had a you — a role model to look up to — when you were a kid first thinking about all of this, would that have made a positive impact? 

DP: Yeah, it would have … I would always watch Jerry Springer and Sally Jessy Raphael (as a kid), because they would have transgender folks on. They would call them cross-dressers, and they would treat them like freaks, but I remember actively seeking out those talk shows because it was a thing I could see. I only realized afterwards, as I got to be an adult, that it was a weird, f***ed up coping mechanism. I was desperately seeking some kind of validation, even if it was negative validation.

Another weirdly positive influence was Dennis Rodman. He showed up wearing a wedding dress to a press conference, and he said something like, “Deep down, every man wants to be a woman a little bit.” … My favorite anecdote response to that was from another basketball player, Hakeem Olajuwon: “No, no — Dennis is very, very, very wrong.” It’s a very funny anecdote that made it clear that, no, that’s not the way most people feel … I experienced both of these at the same time. I totally agreed with Rodman — the pest, the bad boy of basketball or whatever — but also understood from Olajuwon that it was messed up. That was my best role model. My best role models were Springer and Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael and Rodman — not the best set of examples. When you have that as your set of examples for what transness is or for what’s acceptable or not, all the more reason to want to bury that feeling.

AG: This year alone, more than 850 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced, a record-breaking number. Where do you think that’s coming from? 

DP: There’s a simple answer, right? It comes from people in power wanting to retain power and order over things that they can’t retain power and order over. One of the things that I try to teach my kids is that you can’t control other people. You can only control yourself … That’s true for individuals. You can only control yourself. … Unlike at an individual level, where you can only control the actions of yourself, you can start to control the actions of others at the government level. … Any time that there is an advancement in rights for a minority group, it slips backwards as powers shift. We just happen to be at that point in time for queer rights. 

What’s really difficult about our current timeline is, prior to the advent of the Internet, these things happened sequentially. … Then we get to the internet’s invention, and all of a sudden, everything fractures all at the same time. There’s so many movements happening all at once. That’s actually one of the really big difficulties of modern progressivism. You have too many battles to fight. … We want things to be exactly the way that they were 50 years ago. Individual groups say, “No, that was terrible for me,” but not enough of them are terrible in the same ways. 

“I’m not here to police your thoughts. I’m here to be alive, and I’m here to hang out with friends and create events and make this city a better place. That’s my goal. I don’t really care about your individual thoughts.”

Douglas Peterson

To actually answer the question with all that background in mind, legislation is just about control and enforcing world views — enforcing a monoculture in the United States, which is really sad to me, because the U.S. has never been a monoculture. The foundation of our union was a meld of different cultures. … We had different religious sects that were actually built these different states. Then we decided, as a union, to come together and say, “Hey, not only do our states have their own little cultures — the German speakers are here and the French speakers are here — but we’re going to come together and we’re going to unify into a United States where we all have this collective agreement that we’re going to move forward together as a union.”

We lost that spirit, and it’s really sad to me, because that spirit of unification is, to me, the hallmark of what it means to be an American. … Instead of it being about having different cultures, accepting all the different things people can bring and pulling together to create something beautiful and unified, we already have this unified thing. We don’t care about anyone else. I wish folks realized that when you legislate against a person, it actually hurts them.

AG: For the guy who tried to pick a fight with you at Oktoberfest, and people who would be in the same camp as that person, what do you think is the biggest thing they’re getting wrong? What do you wish that they knew more or understood better?

DP: Well, in defense of the guy trying to pick a fight with me at Oktoberfest, he was drunk. I don’t think he really knew what he was doing. … The reason why I don’t think people pick fights with me — even when they’re sober, when they’re of right mind — is that no one does that. Come on. You don’t do that, and when people do commit violence in a sober state of mind, people are like, “Man, that’s messed up.” Pretty uniformly, there’s no party line about it. Everyone thinks people committing violence are messed up. … For folks who want to pick a fight with me in their brain, I would just say to come up and chat with me. I think I’m a pretty amenable person. 

Pretty early on in owning the business, I was outside cleaning up or doing whatever I was doing. This guy wearing a Trump 2020 shirt came up and he looked at me, looked at the sign, looked at me. He asked, “Am I allowed in?” And I said, “Yeah, man! Why wouldn’t you be allowed in?” I’m not here to police your thoughts. I’m here to be alive, and I’m here to hang out with friends and create events and make this city a better place. That’s my goal. I don’t really care about your individual thoughts. … My goal is to make the world a better place in the way that I think and in the way I know how to, and I think that really is, or should be, the goal for most people. 

People with openness would find that there’s a lot more in common than not, but it requires that openness to be open to new ideas, open to new discovery, open to experimentation, open to envisioning a world that’s different but better. Being open is scary. Different is scary. I do realize that’s asking a lot of some people, but it’s kind of on them to figure out whether they want to do that.

AG: How do you think 3-year-old Douglas, 10-year-old Douglas, 18-year-old Douglas, when you were in your 20s Douglas, would feel to look at you now? 

DP: They’d be very confused. … 3-year-old or 10-year-old or even 20-year-old Douglas, none of them had the words. None of them had the vision of what 40-year-old Douglas would look like, and what’s really interesting is that this is common among trans folks — where they can’t see into the future past a certain point because there is no future that makes sense in their head. … You can’t really envision being old. For a really, really long time, I never envisioned myself being older than 40. I couldn’t see it. … Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe somewhere deep down in my subconscious, I knew that something would have to change.