Stuart "Stu" Rasmussen is an American politician and small business owner who served as the mayor of Silverton, Oregon from 2009 to 2015. Rasmussen was a fairly middle-of-the-road "fiscally conservative, socially liberal" politician who had years previously been on the City Council in Silverton.

Stu Rasmussen was also the first openly transgender person elected to a mayoralty in the United States, for a city of any size. Silverton had a population of around 9,000 people at the time of his election, and it would have not been many people's first guess for a city to elect a transgender mayor. Although Oregon has a reputation for being liberal, Silverton is a small city 40 miles to the southeast of Portland, in a county that tends to vote (narrowly) Republican. However, as a small business owner who was familiar to the people of the town, and had already served on City Council, Rasmussen was familiar enough to the people of the town that his transition did not offend them.

Readers might be wondering about my usage of male pronouns for Rasmussen: he was born male, identifies as male, uses male pronouns, but considers himself to be transgender due to having received breast implants and wearing feminine clothing. While his politics are strictly small town middle-of-the-road, his gender expression is intentionally outrageous, involving lots of high heels and plunging necklines. The exact question of whether oversexualized habits are a natural expression of gender identity, or whether Rasmussen also just likes pushing boundaries, is something I couldn't guess at, but does add to the incongruity of Rasmussen's election, given the normally staid environment of Silverton, Oregon.

After his election, Stu Rasmussen's term of mayor was much less eventful, involving few issues that reached outside of the city limits of Silverton, and he left office in 2015.