Despite Rampant Transphobia, Brazil Sets Record for Transgender Candidates in 2020 Elections

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Mostly white and male. This is the historical portrait of Brazilian politics. But in the 2020 municipal elections, a number of candidacies hope to change this scenario. According to data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), 49.9 percent of candidates in Brazil declared themselves black or mixed-race in this election.

There is also a record number of transgender people running for a position this year, whether for City Halls or City Councils. There are over 270 confirmed transgender candidates – in party slates from left to right-wing – more than triple the 2016 figure, when 89 people ran for local office.

In Curitiba (PR) -the eighth-most populous city in Brazil, with almost two million inhabitants-, it is the first time that a trans woman runs for a seat in the Executive branch. At 68, PSOL party psychoanalyst and sociologist Letícia Lanz is seeking to become mayor of the capital of Paraná, heading a 100 percent female slate, with attorney Giana de Marco as her deputy mayor. She is the only trans candidate to run for mayor in all 26 Brazilian capital cities.

She is from Minas Gerais, but 25 years ago she chose to live in the southern city, together with her wife, psychologist Ângela Autran, with whom she has been married for 43 years and with whom she has three children and five grandchildren. She has among her main proposals to promote what she calls the “care economy”, which includes allocating abandoned properties to shelter street dwellers and produce an urban model that privileges the periphery, and not only the city center and the noble neighborhoods of Curitiba.

“My proposal is to have a more gregarious and collective life. We are experiencing a community crisis, people are helpless and destitute,” she says. In the capital of Paraná, of the 16 slates of candidates running for Mayor, only six are headed by women.

Unlike a letter released by party militants in July, which discussed a “local program to fight the middle class,” Lanz advocates dialogue. “Women’s perspective is recreational. Men’s is bellicose. Confrontation is a macho word. The political and economic core is the bone that men don’t want to drop, which is why it is very difficult for women to enter, particularly a trans woman, who is the fifth person after no one,” reflects the candidate, who is also a specialist in gender and sexuality and has a masters degree in sociology.

Managing conflicts is an important part of the candidate’s life, and although she has identified with women since she was a child, she began her gender transition after the age of 50. “I experienced great conflict, and if it weren’t for feminism I would be stuck in the closet until today,” she says. Surviving a heart attack in 2008 made Lanz consolidate her will to live as a woman, which she had been pursuing since childhood.

“The transition was very hard, my whole life I had been a very open person, and my wife too. We always nurtured a positive perspective on life, but it’s not easy to survive in a closed society.” She recalls that the decision to no longer consider transgenerity as an illness is recent. Only in 2018 did the W.H.O. remove transsexuality from the list of mental disorders from the International Classification of Diseases (ICD). The Covid-19 pandemic did not stop her from seeking votes on the streets, despite wearing a mask and a face shield.

This is also the first municipal election in Brazil’s history in which trans candidates can choose their social name at the polls. If it weren’t for a regulation passed two years ago, voters of trans candidates might not recognize the candidates’ names next to their photo that appears at the voting machines. However, the change had long been a claim by social movements, as Ana Cláudia Santano, professor of law and researcher at the Observatory of Electoral Law of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), notes.

“Due to the lack of regulation, the social name was not used and the civil name along with an inconsistent photo in the ballot box was a public embarrassment,” explains the researcher. At least 165 candidates chose social names rather than civil names in 2020, all of them for city council positions.

Trans candidates from left, center, and right-wing

From the MDB, the main representative of the so-called Centrão party bloc, political newcomer Aghata Ferreira, 37 years old, is running for a position as city councilor in the city of Criciúma, in Santa Catarina. A hairdresser and student of education, she has been engaged in social work for 20 years, which will be her central agenda if elected. When the party invited her, she decided it was an opportunity to contribute to the development of public policies in the area.

“One swallow does not make a summer. When MDB invited me, we talked and they made me feel at ease. We want to build a team with new ideas. I am neither right nor left, I fight for the social aspect, which is the basis of everything. How can a child who lives in a household where both father and mother are unemployed get to go to school?”, asks Aghata, who is also the party’s diversity secretary in Criciúma.

In Espírito Santo, a group of transgender women is running for office under the PMB party, ideologically aligned to the right-wing, in Cariacica, a city with almost 390,000 inhabitants in the metropolitan region of Vitória.

Bianca Biancardi, 52, and the party vice-president, Josi Milagre, identify with ultraconservative president Jair Bolsonaro, whom the candidate supported in the second round of elections in 2018 mainly for the anti-corruption flag. In her assessment, the Brazilian President’s transphobic statements are a thing of the past.

“I am a Bolsonaro voter and I feel represented by him. We were living under a very corrupt politics. That discouraged me. The homophobic statements that he made, everyone knows, are in the past,” says Bia (as she prefers to be called), an entrepreneur and owner of a beauty salon in the city for 35 years.

The candidate’s opportunity to work in a beauty salon at the age of 17, a few years after starting to identify with the female gender, is something that is very dear to her. Being able to be formally employed is crucial to prevent trans people from having to resort to prostitution in order to survive, she points out.

The National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA) estimates that in Brazil, 90 percent of trans people resort to prostitution, at least once in their lives. “These are girls who have been abandoned by their families, who drop out of school, and who wouldn’t be on the streets if they had an opportunity,” the candidate says.

Bia praises the work of the Minister of Women, Family, and Human Rights, Damares Alves, to improve the employment of the trans population. “She has this project to train transgender girls in the area of technology, which is something I want to copy in Cariacica. What is good needs to be copied.” Recently, the candidate complained to the Minister for being excluded from an electoral event by the evangelical legislators in the municipality. “And this happened because I am a transgender woman. I am a Catholic Christian and yet I was excluded,” she laments.

In mid-October, participants in an online seminar on elections promoted by the National LBGBT+ Alliance were victims of zoombombing. In other words, the event was raided and messages and images of Nazism and discrimination were placed on the screen. “This shows that even if these candidacies make it, they are also more attacked. The status quo is sensitive to any kind of movement that intends to change it,” stresses professor Ana Claudia Santana.

ANTRA’s president Keila Simpson stresses that the increased participation of the trans population in politics is related to the urgency in fighting violence against transgender women and men in Brazil. The country leads the unfortunate NGO Transgender Europe ranking of countries that most kill transgender people. Through May this year 38 murders occurred.

“This caused people to start fighting in political parties to find a way to mitigate this. There is a political awakening of trans people. The trans bodies are politicians by nature, but to dispute an election is a victory against everything and everyone, of a population relegated to the sidelines.”

According to Keila, the space for trans people is different in each municipality, which explains the membership to parties of such different ideologies. “Obviously, for us, choosing the right and far-right is a surprise, but we don’t condemn it. That’s probably the space that opened up and they seized the opportunity.”

As a future plan, ANTRA intends to hold courses and seminars in political training. “Educated, informed, and aware of each party’s ideologies, an individual will understand the political spectrum. Whether you want to be right, left or center is a personal decision. We want to form an even stronger collective of people to run for future elections.”

Source: El País