Congratulations, Madam Mayor!
The first interview on Erica Deuso's groundbreaking first week as mayor of Downingtown, PA.
Last week, I was so fortunate to have an opportunity to be the first person to interview openly trans mayor, Erica Deuso, on her first week in office. If you haven’t heard her name before, Mayor Deuso was the first openly transgender person elected to a mayoral position anywhere in Pennsylvania, and is the only sitting trans mayor in the US! I’m SO excited to be sharing our interview with y’all today!
I’m so grateful that we were introduced by some of the folks who were key players in her successful campaign, the organization FUTR, which I’ve written about a number of times on here. FUTR, Families United for Trans Rights, is an organization of parents and families of trans kids helping trans people get elected to public office around the country and advocating for inclusive policies.
On the 28th, they’ll be hosting an evening of discussion around the upcoming documentary “State of Firsts”, on the historic campaign and election of transgender congresswoman Sarah McBride. The event will feature members of the film’s production team, as well as Sarah’s parents David & Sally McBride, who will share their own unique perspectives and pride in her journey. I’ll certainly be there, and I would love to see you too!
Hearing about Sarah McBride’s campaign, if it’s anything like her outstanding book, is going to be an evening of joy and empowerment and possibility.
Let’s jump into our interview!
Ben Greene: Tell me about your story. How did you end up here?
Erica Deuso: I grew up in South Burlington, Vermont. Daughter of two people who just celebrated their fifty-first wedding anniversary. Really great family, and I have one sibling.
We grew up never having a lot, but always having enough. There was always enough love to go around, but food and heat and shelter…those were different stories. So, I know a good deal about what it means to have to scrimp and save and to go without.
But it was our neighbors, our family, our friends who really helped us get through the tougher times, food, clothing, shelter, heat, money. I learned that your neighbors are good people. They’re the people you can turn to when you have a problem, when you needed help. Always just go to your neighbors.
Within a few months of graduating from college, I was living overseas in Copenhagen, Denmark. I did my graduate studies in biochemistry over there, worked in the brewing industry, and got to see how democratic socialism actually works. While I never really enjoyed giving up 54% of my paycheck, I did appreciate the low-cost public transportation, no-cost health insurance, and free PhD.
When I moved back [to the US], I needed a place to live and I decided to look around at a few towns in Chester County. I really liked it out there. It was close to where I worked. I could get on the train right into Philadelphia. I found Downingtown, and I went to an event called Good Neighbor Day.
Ben Greene: Good neighbor day! That’s so perfect for you.
Erica Deuso: That’s right! That got me, and then seeing how people treated each other, in businesses around town. When I was viewing my house, somebody came to the door and said “Hey, are you looking at buying here? This neighborhood is really great. We have a lot of kids. We have a lot of families here. You know? Everybody’s really welcome.” That made me feel great. So I bought in 2007, so I’ve been here coming up on on nineteen years.
When I ended up transitioning, I was really scared. I’d heard all of the weird things, all the bad things that happened to people. This was 2009. The only media coverage we got was the murders of trans people, the spectator stories or the sad stories. Those are the only kind of stories that we got back then.
And so, you know, I was really worried. But my neighbors, true to their form, were great. You know? Everybody just welcomed me, welcomed the transition. Pronouns, names, all of that were just amazing. Nobody really messed up. I never got any harassment, discrimination in my town. It was a great experience. I feel pretty blessed on that.
Ben Greene: So tell me more about how you decided to run for Mayor!
I decided to run because, you know, this is a good neighbor town. They were so great to me, I wanted to give back, and it doesn’t hurt that the former mayor of town personally asked me to run for his seat. When the mayor asks you to step up for your town, you take that to heart.
I had been politically active for about a decade. I worked on some of Bernie Sanders’ campaign around the county, and then in 2022 I was voted our Democratic Party’s committee person in my precinct. So I’ve been working with them for six for four years now, just always thinking about Downingtown and how we can get more people out, how we can knock on doors, how we can spread the word about democracy and the importance of getting out and building our democratic base in this town.
Ben Greene: From what I’ve seen, your campaign was really focused around connection, and now talking to you, it’s so obvious that “be a good neighbor” is the foundational belief of how you are as a human, how you are as a mayor. Tell me more about how you made that choice to focus your campaign around connection, door knocking, and how that went.
Erica Deuso: Coming at this as a trans person, being trans should never be your number one most identifiable trait. It should be about what you can do for the people. What are the important things? What do people care about? If I was to run this campaign simply to focus on my identity, nobody would care.
Before I ran, I was talking to people at doors every year during the primaries, asking them who they are, what they think, what they’re up to. And so you get a sense when you’ve knocked on thousands of doors, you hear the same themes over and over and over again, the things that people wanna see done.
People care about things like traffic and about flood mitigation in our town. They care about our businesses. They care about being able to afford their houses, and keeping a roof over their head and food on the table.
They also want a mayor who is not afraid to speak up when they see injustice, when they see things go wrong. They want somebody who’s not gonna, you know, sit back and just, you know, not care or not do anything. And I’ve never been the type of person who doesn’t speak up when something bad happens.
So I focused my campaign on the things that people care about.
Ben Greene: I really love that. This past election season it really seemed like that focus on actually listening to voters’ needs instead of just fearmongering about trans people was so successful.
Erica Deuso: Yeah! You look at places like New York City, New Jersey, Virginia, right here in Downingtown. You saw candidates over and over again on the right try to play up the social issues, try to try to fearmonger on trans issues. And what happened? Landslide victories in Virginia, Jersey, New York, here, all around this country because people care about what a politician is going to do for you.
It’s not just “vote for me and everything’s gonna be great!” No. It doesn’t work that way. Things are still gonna be tough, and, I can’t do things about, you know, how much your groceries cost. But what I can do is I can say, hey, let’s plant a community garden. We can’t build a house on that plot anymore, but maybe we get a community garden and a free forage area.
That’s the kind of thing that I want for people. Things that we can do at the local level to help make people’s lives easier. Fearmongering on trans issues is not gonna make anybody’s life easier.
Ben Greene: I know in your campaign you worked closely with the organization “Families United for Trans Rights (FUTR), which is primarily made up of parents and families of trans kids. What was it like working with an organization like that?
Oh, they were great. Hearing from people, from parents, from relatives, siblings of trans people, you know, it puts things into perspective. You hear so many bad things coming from the national news and you think everything is terrible.
But to know that so many of these families are out there supporting their kids, getting them the care that they need, and then getting out there and advocating for their own children, that makes me feel great. It makes you feel good that these kids have an opportunity that I definitely didn’t have in the 80’s. A lot of trans people who had to transition later in life, they never thought they would have.
The greatest part of all of that is knowing that those kids just get to be kids. It was amazing to be supported by an organization like that.
Ben Greene: Switching gears a little, this is your first official week in office. How did it go? How does it feel?
Erica Deuso: It feels good. I got sworn in, and then Wednesday I got an email or a text message from somebody in Borough Hall saying that a union organizer had stopped by and wanted to get all the information that we had on the bid process for a borough job that we’re doing right now.
There were so many things I was worried about. Horrible messages, or vandalism. No. None of that happened. The first thing I get from everybody is that the unions want to talk to you about how we went through the bid process. That’s why I signed up for this—I want this kind of responsibility.
So to know that not only am I interacting with somebody on the official level as mayor, but I’m actually proposing policy, that was pretty awesome. Then I got invited to go out to Pittsburgh to see the installation of judge Brandon Newman, Superior Court of Pennsylvania. To have the superior court and, actually, one or two Supreme Court members come up to me and say “congratulations, madam mayor.” Wow. To hear that from people that I didn’t know had even followed this made me feel great.
Then coming back and with all the stuff that happened in Minneapolis and then Portland, I sat down to have conversations, the police chief and I, about how we would interact with ICE in our community and what we would need to do. How is our local police going to step in if there’s a situation like this again? It’s those kinds of questions that we need to figure out.
And then tonight, I’m meeting up with some friends that I haven’t seen in quite some time because of the campaign and I’m gonna just have a nice evening out with my husband.
Ben Greene: Oh, I love that. That’s so fantastic. I love that you campaigned on “hey, I’m not gonna let you put me in the trans box, I’m a whole person,” and you’re getting to really live that.
Erica Deuso: Yes. You’re always always gonna have the people who come at you because of your policy positions. I have no problem with that. The problem I have is when they just go straight for identity. You know?
Ben Greene: Exactly! Okay, two more questions for you: What has been your biggest surprise from this whole journey?
Erica Deuso: When I first started running, one of the first things that I was told by a former mayor is that the key to this borough is getting in with all of the old Italian folks around town. They’re the ones who come out to vote.
And the thing that surprised me is that those old Italian folks are the same ones who you know, they did come out and they did vote, and they were the surprising ones who were huge supporters of me because I didn’t sit there and BS them.
They’ve gotten to talk to a lot of politicians in their lives, and everybody comes to them for their votes. But I came to them with questions. I didn’t show up to their doorstep, asking for their vote. I was there asking what their problems with town are. Where do they see opportunities to improve? Because they’ve lived here their entire lives. They’ve seen this place grow.
People like having those kind of conversations because it brings up the root causes of their issues. And that’s one of the things that I’m trained in, is root cause analysis. I want to get to the root of what the problems are so that instead of just slapping a Band Aid on a problem, we’re actually solving it.
Ben Greene: Yeah. I love that focus. Okay, final question for you. I know even though you didn’t run on this campaign of being the first out trans mayor of this borough, that is the record that you broke, and you’re probably hearing from a lot of people about what that means. And I know that that can be really rewarding, and it can also come with a lot of weight.
What does rest and self care and joy look like for you in this new, highly visible role?
Erica Deuso: One of the things that nobody asks about is what it feels like to be trusted with things. You know? 1,790 people trusted me with this town. They gave me something very fragile that, you know, with a couple bad things could turn this town upside down. And they gave it to me under the guise of “we trust you. We believe in you. We want you to take care of this for us.”
That’s a lot of weight. And then you add in the weight of being the first, and it’s not just the first in this borough. It’s the first trans mayor in Pennsylvania and the only transgender mayor currently in office in The United States.
That’s a lot of weight. I have to balance out the job that I do here in Downingtown with the expectations of a trans and an LGBTQ community who’s looking at me to make a good impression. I think I’m gonna do that by focusing on the issues.
As far as how I handle joy and relaxation and rest, my husband and I are big craft beer fans. Like I said, I worked in the brewing industry in Denmark, so we go out once or twice a month. We go try different craft beer companies in the area, and sometimes we take trips to go and try different areas and see where things are.
One of the other things I’m signing up for this year, it’s called the Everest 29029 challenge. You go and you hike the equivalent of 29,029 feet in thirty six hours. I’m training for that. And I find hiking, running, even going for a good walk. I find that meditative. It allows me to think about things, but also to tune out everything and focus on my breathing, focus on my body, focus on just improving my mental health.
And I think that’s really important in a position like this where you have a lot of a lot of weight on your shoulders, that you find time to take that weight off every once in a while.
Ben Greene: What an amazing challenge! That’s so cool. Thank you so much for taking some time out of your afternoon to sit down with me. I really appreciate it. Congratulations again. Good luck with the beginning of your term as mayor.
Erica Deuso: Thank you so much!
A huge thank you again to mayor Deuso and to FUTR for setting this up. Don't forget to join FUTR for their event on January 28th!
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That’s all I’ve got for you today, folks. I know it’s been a heavy few days, and I hope you’re finding the space you need for rest, rage, community, and action. The fight for a better world will take all of us.
All my love,
Ben