Toni Mua, Trans Candidate for Michigan Legislature, Has Faced Bricks and Ballot Challenges. She's Still Knocking on Doors.
For the Detroit candidate, the 2026 race for Michigan's District 9 is personal
When Toni Mua first ran for Michigan's state legislature in 2022, she put her deadname on the ballot. She didn't make a big deal of it — running as a trans woman in a district that also covered the Grosse Pointes felt like enough of a challenge. This year, she decided she was done with that compromise and filed under her name. Almost immediately, someone challenged it.
"I was just really confused because I'm like, who is this man? Why do you have a problem with me running now?" she said. The challenge was denied, and Mua says she expects an appeal. In the meantime, she’s still knocking on doors.
Mua, 29, is running as a Democrat for Michigan's 9th House District — a majority-Black seat she knows from the inside, having grown up where her family put down roots decades ago. The race looks different from her 2022 bid, after redistricting pulled the boundaries of what is now District 9 into Detroit proper, where her previous District 10 had stretched into the Grosse Pointes. Mua says the old boundaries brought more hostility her way.
Mua is one of three trans women seeking Democratic House nominations this cycle, alongside Joanna Whaley in District 2 and Aaron Bailey in District 92. The trio grew out of a group of four candidates who dubbed themselves the "Dollhouse" earlier this year; the fourth, Kali Scales, has since withdrawn from the District 5 race. Michigan has never elected an openly trans state representative.
Her roots in the community she's asking to represent run deeper than her campaign. Mua was 14 or 15 the first time she showed up at Motor City Pride — the only queer person in her family, looking for a community she couldn't find at home. She kept coming back, volunteering more each year, and by the third year, a single-day shift had stretched to four. She eventually rose to volunteer coordinator, putting systems in place she says made the operation smoother and kept volunteers returning. "I found so many folks that I now call family," she told Pride Source. It's a pattern that has followed her ever since: She shows up, sees what needs fixing and ends up running things.
When the District 9 incumbent announced a run for a different seat, Mua jumped in, nudged by constituents who'd been coming to her anyway for help navigating programs and resources their elected officials weren't connecting them to.
"There isn't leadership that's giving them the resources they're looking for," she said. "Or they just haven't connected them with the right folks."
District 9's needs are concrete. It's home to a high concentration of seniors, and Mua says the flooding along Detroit's riverfront has been the defining, still-unaddressed crisis of her adult life — one she's experienced firsthand. "Over the past 10 years, there have been a record number of floods. I know my house has flooded at least seven times within the last decade. And there's no state help when it comes to that." Recent coverage of flooding near Alfred B. Ford Park, which falls within the district, has brought some visibility to the problem. Mua sees her role as forcing that conversation into Lansing.
She's also clear-eyed about what her candidacy means to people who'd rather derail it. In 2022, bricks came through her window and hostile letters arrived at her home address, which had inadvertently been listed on campaign materials instead of her P.O. box; she involved police. This cycle, the hostility has moved online. Meshawn Maddock — the former Michigan Republican Party co-chair who was among 16 people charged in the state's 2020 fake electors scheme — posted about trans women candidates on social media this cycle, part of a pattern of attacks Mua has learned not to let land.
"I used to be worried," she said. "And then I had a really good conversation with a friend, and we came to realize that I've been fear-mongered the entirety of my life." She traces that perspective to growing up as a tall, Black teenager during the Trayvon Martin era, learning early that public space carried danger and moving through it anyway.
The deadname challenge mirrors what Whaley has faced in her primary, where fellow Democrat Frank Liberati filed a complaint challenging her ballot access over her legal name change — one the Wayne County Clerk has since rejected. Mua describes the similar challenge to her candidacy as part of a pattern by someone with a long history of election-related filings in Michigan.
"This isn't the first time I've run, and last time I did have to put my deadname on the ballot, which I didn't have a problem with," she said. "But this go-round I did just want to focus beyond my identity."
She'll make that case in a crowded Aug. 4 primary — eight Democrats total are on the District 9 ballot. For Mua, the path forward looks the same as it always has: constituent by constituent, door by door.
"The attacks just put more fire under me to go out and knock on these doors."
Learn more about Mua’s campaign attonimua.comtonimua.com. Find your sample ballot at vote411.org.
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