November 2025

CWs: this piece discusses instances of transmisogyny & transmisogynoir, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, murder & femicide, sexual assault, self-harm, prostitution, and police violence.

For the 16th consecutive year, Brazil holds the shameful title of the country that kills the most trans women.[1] When one imagines a country that murders queer & trans people en masse, one would usually picture places where LGBTQ life is openly criminalized, or places marked by xenophobic and religious intolerance. However, public perception still underestimates the impact of normalized hate and how it can undermine existing legislation, making such barbarism more palatable. Even in seemingly tolerant societies, the normalization of hate shapes public perception while feeding into broader mechanisms of oppression. Capitalism continually reinforces this hate, constructing and exploiting divisions among the oppressed to prevent the recognition of their shared exploitation, while constantly undercutting their collective organizing against it. 

A few decades ago, being transgender or a travesti[2] was openly prohibited. These gender identities were not even formally recognized, but were banned via formal prohibitions, vagrancy laws, and public decency codes, all backed by capitalist, patriarchal, authoritarian, and Christian logic. Simply existing as a trans woman or travesti on the streets, especially at night, was enough for arrest and detention. 

But exclusion wasn’t limited to the tangled actions of state laws alone. Trans women and travestis—collectively often labelled “transvestites”—were prohibited from entering restaurants, cinemas, malls, concerts, or even gay and lesbian nightclubs, in situations where other members of LGBTQ communities often barred them at door, accusing them of “causing trouble” or “lowering the status of the venues”. During the military dictatorship (1964–1985), the persecution of travestis intensified significantly. They were indiscriminately arrested, beaten, tortured, sexually abused, had their heads forcibly shaved, and were subjected to every kind of brutality the detention unit could come up with. Under the Amnesty Law, the torturers, abusers, and murderers were never held accountable for their actions under the dictatorship, and these individuals continue to be publicly honored by far-right figures. A few years later, in 1987, Operation Tarântula arrested more than 300 travestis in just over ten days, using the same tactics as those employed under the dictatorship, as did countless similar operations of that era. Learning to navigate a corrupt state, some travestis kept enough money to bribe the police, or cut themselves in the cell with blades hidden in their mouths so they’d be released.

This systematic murder is still openly supported by government figures, as seen during former President Jair Bolsonaro’s term, where he stated on national TV that he’d rather have a drug-dealing son than a gay one, and that beating gays in the streets was justified. While he couldn’t legally implement such aggression, his public rhetoric was enough to legitimize and perpetuate these acts socially.

Prostitution and Sexual Objectification

The objectification of women & LGBTQ people becomes a major tool in perpetuating this system. Their bodies are used as exploited labor, reduced to objects of heterosexual consumption, and commodified as an array of pornographic fetish genres, all while their personhood is invisibilized and humanity stripped. This gendered marginalization disproportionately affects trans women and queer people in general, creating barriers that force them to resort to extreme survival strategies, such as sex work. As a consequence, upwards of 90 percent of Brazilian trans women are forced into prostitution.[3] The notorious refusal to accept them in civilian, non-sexual workplaces is often accompanied by humiliation, moral harassment, and violence. Dressing like a man ends up being the best alternative to secure a job, even in companies that claim to be inclusive.

Sex workers are constant targets of physical and sexual violence. In cases committed against this vulnerable strata of workers, blame is frequently shifted to the victim. If they’re assaulted, “they knew the risks”; if they’re murdered, “they were in the wrong place”; if they get sick, “they chose that life”; if they’re raped, “they were already doing that kind of work.” Since 1940, prostitution has not been a crime in Brazil, although brothels and pimping are.[4] In practice, the sale of sexual services is not regulated, and legal gray zones are taken advantage of by both johns and the state, where sex workers, especially trans women and travestis, who report violence to the police can instead be arrested for vagrancy or public indecency.[5] There are no laws that guarantee them any form of legal protection, recognition of rights, or effective reporting mechanisms, leaving them hesitant to take their cases to court for (not unfounded) fears of being harassed. As Molly Smith and Juno Mac argue in Revolting Prostitutes, the legal and repressive arms of the state often operate to pushing sex work further underground, making it more dangerous for sex workers, and preventing them from seeking help or reporting crimes.

Beyond employment difficulty, there’s a practical issue at the core of why many women are forced into sex work. When a young woman is expelled from home after revealing her gender or orientation and finds no occupations or shelters, she easily falls into the hands of pimps. Whether through promises of safety, comfort, food, or even support in her transition, prostitution becomes the only means of achieving a minimally dignified survival, albeit under constant exploitation. According to activist Amara Moira, “Prostitution was a way for us to make our existence possible. When everyone wanted us dead, prostitution allowed us to live one more day.”[6] In this situation, organized bodies of sex workers in Brazil continue to mobilize to fight for basic legal protections, labour rights, and safety mechanisms. 

On top of street workers, Brazil is one of the countries that consumes the most trans pornography in the world.[7] In the porn industry, trans women are usually portrayed grotesquely and stereotypically fitted into narratives centered on “genital surprise,” transgression, and how sinful it is to be attracted to them. It’s estimated that the global porn market moves hundreds of billions of dollars per year, fueling digital platforms, tech companies, modeling agencies, and ad networks. But none of that profit reaches those in front of the camera. Pornography operates without formal contracts, posing risks to physical and mental health, exposure to STDs, harassment, humiliation, and sexual violence. As with prostitution, the lack of regulation nullifies the rights of these workers, leaving them entirely at the mercy of the sadism of their employers.

A point frequently espoused by the right wing in Brazil is that children cannot be transgender. The logic behind this is that transitioning is immediately linked to the erotic and the vulgar. As a consequence of systemic exclusion, trans people are only seen on the streets or in porn, rather than existing across the whole spectrum of society. When people see a trans girl or trans woman, they do not associate her with the wider archetypes of womanhood that cis girls or cis women are viewed through throughout society, as stifling as they can be. They see the trans girl as only one: the prostitute, the pornographic sexual object, and thus do not see transness as something disconnected from the sex trade. 

The same applies to the prospect of romantic relationships. While they constantly pursue trans women sexually, they actively oppose anything beyond that. Even in the situations where solicitors may claim to see them as “men”, they ironically refuse to admit to homosexual desires, contradicting themselves by isolating sexuality from affection. They’re not able to admit tender feelings like love for them, or they simply don’t believe these women are worthy of love. They prefer to keep them as underground, extramarital sexual objects while having a cis woman with whom they can maintain a traditional, socially respected family.

These circumstances are often extremely dangerous for trans women, and there are countless reports of men - and not only straight men - who go as far as murdering the women they were involved with to avoid being exposed. Such is the case of Marcos Yuri Amorim, arrested on July 12th for allegedly killing his girlfriend Carmen de Oliveira Alves[8], 26, with the help of his lover Roberto Carlos, all to avoid acknowledging the sexual relationship. The case is under investigation as a transfemicide.

The Process of Dehumanization

Want to kill a human being? First exoticize and otherize them, then strip them of their humanity, then turn them into a worthless object, and finally separate them from support. Stripping humanity to be able to kill without remorse is a psychological tactic frequently employed in war. Taking it even further, it’s the same logic applied by speciesism to justify their torture of animals in slaughterhouses. 

According to the ANTRA Dossier, the average life expectancy of a trans person in Brazil is 35 years, less than half that of the general population. Last year, 122 trans women were killed, and 78 percent of them (among those whose race was recorded) were Black. Most were young, impoverished, from the Northeast, and murdered in public spaces.[9] 

A particularly shocking case was the death of human rights advocate, singer, and city council candidate Santrosa, 27, who was found decapitated, with her hands and feet tied.[10] Such cruelty is the norm with transfemicide. Murderers make sure not only to take their lives but also to publicly demonstrate their repulsion toward trans women’s bodies — rape, mutilation of genitals, strangling, dismembering, bludgeoning, decapitating, discarding them in empty lots. This is the result of a patriarchal, racist, capitalist system that exploits and destroys women, trans, and queer people, and is continually fuelled by hate publicly defended as “freedom of expression”. 

Although stereotyped for Carnival, soccer, and Latin joy, Brazil is an extremely conservative country. With 83.6% of the population identifying as Christian, religious extremism is one reason why trans deaths are made invisible. Fanatics often justify their objectification by claiming their souls are condemned, and all bad things that happen to them are seen as divine punishment. Despite formally being a secular state, the Brazilian legislature is visibly influenced by Christian morality. Highlighted here is the Evangelical caucus, with its increasingly absurd projects, such as sentencing women who get abortions after sexual assault to more prison time than their rapists[11], criminalizing “gender ideology”[12], and attempts to ban same-sex marriage. Fortunately, since bills don’t rely solely on the caucus’s approval, they rarely get implemented, though public support tends to align with their views, reflected in everyday behavior. Far from the halls of government, such conservatism also extends into gang-controlled areas, further worsening the situation for trans women in the urban peripheries. In these places, women often have to hide their gender to avoid being targeted. They can’t report to the police (as calling police into favelas would interfere with drug operations) leaving them at the mercy of the moralistic judgment of organized crime. 

Advances in the Trans Struggle

Though regional initiatives often propose projects that violate LGBTQ rights, the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court has acted as a vital barrier against such unconstitutional measures. Thanks to intense LGBTQI+ activism, since 2009, gender-affirming surgery has been offered through SUS[13], free and accessible to all. Though the waiting list can take years, SUS has enabled at least 690 trans people to have the surgery without paying a cent. Additionally, hormones and medical monitoring for transitioning are provided free of charge. In 2018, name and gender changes in civil registries were legalized, and in the following year, 2019, homophobia was legally equated to racism,  a non-bailable crime punishable by up to 5 years in prison.

While these are significant advances for the community, this does not mean that the government provides all the necessary support. Transfemicide remains underreported, with very few perpetrators held accountable. Many crimes are committed by strangers, making pursuit and prosecution difficult. On top of that, the majority of transfemicide victims are sex workers from marginalized areas abandoned by the state, and there are often legal refusals to recognize these deaths as stemming from prejudice, or even to legally identify them as women.

Criminalizing transphobia isn’t enough to undo decades of hate and violence. It’s not enough to guarantee access to education, healthcare, and workplace integration. Urgent action is needed in the form of public policies, social media campaigns, inclusive education content, and stronger social services. It’s also crucial to intensify the investigation and punishment of aggressors, as impunity encourages violence and heightens the insecurity of survivors, who numbered 57 in 2024.

Even in the face of this devastating reality, Brazilian trans women continue to resist with courage. We must mobilize the struggle in a way that dismantles the separatist rhetoric propagated by certain sectors of feminism that reproduce transphobia, claiming that trans women are threats to cis women, just as violent as straight men, or inherently sexually dangerous. This is particularly necessary when people are able to understand the violence done to trans women as transmisogyny[14]—and due to the particular intersection of anti-Black and transmisogynistic violence in Brazil, transmisogynoir—linking together struggles with misogyny and transphobia to identify why trans women, in particular Black trans women, are made hypervisible to be marked for sexualization, violence, and hate speech by states, and why so often cis women and all trans people are targeted by conservatives under the possibility they “might be” trans women.

The “social conundrum” with transness isn’t just the disruption of gender binaries, it is ultimately the unfounded societal perception that someone has “willingly chosen to lower themselves into the ‘subordinated and sexualized condition’ of being a woman”, used as justification for all kinds of physical and sexual violence. It is a symbolic reaffirmation of the feminine as abject. But for transfeminine readers, I hope this report has prompted reflection on the ways your life may be affected by mechanisms of oppression, and the importance of fostering alliances of international resistance among the LGBTQ community through your own active resistance. The struggle is immense, but you are not alone.

Notes

1. ANTRA 2024 Dossier. 2024. https://antrabrasil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/dossie-antra-2025.pdf
2. A term employed in discourses and scholarship for Latin American transfeminine communities that developed in the context of those urban histories. Travestis are culturally considered ‘people who break the barrier between masculine and feminine’, not fully identifying exactly with the opposite gender, while often being socially grouped with but not identical to (implicitly) cis women, & culturally have strong contemporary spatial and political overlap with the term, social position, and analytical lens of the “umbrella” of trans women (where some individually do also or don’t also identify with the term trans woman), and thus are often highlighted together in modern scholarship on gender in Latin America as trans women and travestis. 
3. ANTRA 2024 Dossier. 2024. https://antrabrasil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/dossie-antra-2025.pdf
4. Molly Smith and Juno Mac make the argument in Revolting Prostitutes that police leverage these laws to label groups of sex workers sharing homes or working together for safety, without pimps and not employed in brothels, as still “operating brothels” or “being pimped”, which becomes an avenue for state-driven arrests or displacements of sex workers - whose legal rights are neglected or nonexistent - into isolation and more dangerous locations. This is despite the still-existing prevalence of trans women sex workers still being exploited under actual pimps.
5.  Daniela Palma. Framed Statements of “Vagrant” Bodies: Reading of an Archive of Police Repression on Travesti Prostitution. https://www.scielo.br/j/alfa/a/tbNMScMVLLnSnDWQcCwBvPg/?format=pdf&lang=en
6. Amara Moira. So What If I’m A Puta. Diaries of Transness, Sex Work, and Desire. (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2025), p. 12
7. Institute on Race, Equality, and Human Rights. 2011. https://raceandequality.org/resources/transcinema-trans-presence-and-representation-in-brazilian-audiovisual-media/
8. Desirèe Assis. "Após suspeito confessar assassinato, família de estudante trans da Unesp cobra punição: 'A gente não consegue ter paz'". Globo. August 02, 2025. https://g1.globo.com/sp/sao-jose-do-rio-preto-aracatuba/noticia/2025/08/02/apos-suspeito-confessar-assassinato-familia-de-estudante-trans-da-unesp-cobra-punicao-a-gente-nao-consegue-ter-paz.ghtml
9. ANTRA 2024 Dossier. 2024. https://antrabrasil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/dossie-antra-2025.pdf
10. Graham Robson. “'An irreparable loss'. Trans singer and politician Santrosa found murdered in Brazilian forest." Scene Mag. November 11, 2024. https://www.scenemag.co.uk/an-irreparable-loss-trans-singer-and-politician-santrosa-found-murdered-in-brazilian-forest/
11. Diana Cariboni. "Brazilian rape victims who have abortions may face longer in jail than rapists". OpenDemocracy. June 20, 2024. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/brazil-new-anti-abortion-law-homicide-child-rape-victims-prison-longer-abusers/
12. "'I Became Scared, This Was Their Goal' Efforts to Ban Gender and Sexuality Education in Brazil". Human Rights Watch. May 20, 2022. https://www.hrw.org/report/2022/05/12/i-became-scared-was-their-goal/efforts-ban-gender-and-sexuality-education-brazil
13. Sistema Único de Saúde. The Brazilian public health system.
14. A term referring to the particular nature of misogyny that targets trans women and transfeminine people, first coined by Julia Serano in Whipping Girl. The concept of ransmisogynoir was later employed by Moya Bailey in Misogynoir Transformed to underpin the global relationship between anti-Blackness and misogyny. For further writing on the feminist philosophical and historical dimensions of these frames of gender violence, see work by Emma Heaney, Jules Gill-Peterson, and Nsámbu Za Suékama.