After being targeted online in a harassment campaign, a transgender candidate in Northeast Ohio’s rural Geauga County almost dropped out of the race for township trustee. But Amy Heutmaker stayed in the race and won, possibly the first trans elected official in Ohio to do so for a municipal government election.
Heutmaker joins Arienne Childrey – who was appointed to St. Marys City Council last January – as the second trans person in the state to ever hold a council seat and joins Dion Manley as the second trans candidate in the state to win a local election.
Voters in Russell Township cast over 800 ballots to choose Heutmaker to take a seat on the township board during the Nov. 4 general election. The 53-year-old licensed mental health counselor wants to heal the political divide plaguing her community.
“It’s a great community,” she said. “Even the people that don’t agree with me politically that I’ve met, we’ve been able to have those face-to-face conversations.”
‘If not me, then who?’
Heutmaker moved to Russell Township in 2024 from Rochester, New York to join her wife, who has lived there since 2018. The township is known for its abundance of green space and residential properties usually around an acre in size.
But Russell Township also has a high number of vacant and blighted properties, Heutmaker said. She highlighted that issue on the campaign trail, as well as the need for a more transparent local government and potential property tax relief.
Heutmaker initially wasn’t sure she wanted to run for office, but after getting involved in local politics and hearing about a trustee’s retirement after 50 years in office, she changed her mind.
“It became apparent that if not me, then who was going to be the voice for [change] locally?” she recalled.
Heutmaker never made LGBTQ+ issues her platform – she thought her community wouldn’t have supported that – but she still wants to see what she can do in office to help the queer community. In her blog, she wrote about her identity as a “woman who happens to be transgender,” what that means and what it represents in society.
‘Don’t let the assholes win’
On the evening of Sept. 9, a Facebook group recirculated a post about Heutmaker’s bid for township trustee. The comments ranged from supportive to crude to death threats.
Heutmaker didn’t learn of the post until Sept. 10 — the same day Charlie Kirk was killed. That amplified the post, and sent Heutmaker into “freakout panic mode,” she said.
She had to pull down her social media, she said. She had Russell Township police monitoring her house and brought in security for a public speaking event.
Heutmaker considered pulling out of the race, but her dad reminded her of her interest in politics ever since she was a kid.
“Amy, don’t even think about it,” Heutmaker recalled him saying. “You’ve been wanting to run for office since you were a little kid, and you have this great interest in politics and civics.
“Don’t let the assholes win.”
After the incident, traffic on her campaign website skyrocketed.
“I couldn’t have bought that much attention, and then my traffic only grew throughout the election season,” she said.
Reinvigorated, she wanted to keep running for “people who’ve been doxxed.”
“The algorithms of social media are breaking us,” she said.
‘Let’s meet our neighbors’
With her election win, Heutmaker hopes to help ease the divisive rhetoric and get neighbors to unplug and talk to each other.
“Let’s meet our neighbors,” she said. “That’s what I ran on, and people responded to it. Even people that didn’t agree with me, when they saw me in the community, they knew I was approachable.”
She wants to champion more face-to-face conversation, as she believes people act differently once they begin to know each other. Case in point, she thinks she is already developing a good working relationship with a Republican trustee who was just elected alongside her.
Winning an election in a conservative town as an LGBTQ+ person was a “surreal” but “humbling” experience, Heutmaker said. Her win – and other queer elected officials – create governments that better represent the makeup of their respective communities.
“The LGBTQ+ population continues to grow, especially with Gen Z and Gen Alpha, so we’re not going away,” Heutmaker said. “We’re actually underrepresented as elected officials, [and] we’re just starting to catch up.” 🔥
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