Attacks on trans identities become a strategic political tool in Brazil
Speeches targeting trans people proved to be an effective tool on social media for right-wingers
This story was produced under the Feminist Journalist Fellowship, it is part of a series highlighting the work of our fellows, developed in collaboration with Global Voices
and Noor.
In July 2022, Kim Flores was denied a waxing service in São Paulo for being a trans woman. Despite having a scheduled appointment, when Flores arrived at the place, she was informed that the establishment only provided waxing services for “biological women.” Flores, a graphic designer who creates social media video content, took to the internet to share her story (the video has since been deleted). She left a Google review describing what happened and posted videos about the situation for her 10,000 TikTok followers.
In the next few days, the videos and the review posted by Flores were turned against her. They were used as a moral panic weapon against the presence of trans women in women’s spaces by right-wing politicians and influencers. Nikolas Ferreira, who was a city councilor in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais state, at the time, reposted Flores’s video on Instagram, adding that Flores “identifies as a woman, but is a man, and is now crying transphobia.”
Ferreira was elected for his first term in 2020, and during his time as a councillor, he was already known for addressing a trans woman peer, Duda Salabert, by using male pronouns and reinforcing that he didn’t acknowledge her gender identity. Later on, he was convicted of transphobia for his public comments about Salabert. He was also prosecuted for publishing a video exposing an underage trans girl in a school’s bathroom, which he claimed was recorded by his own sister.
“It’s very convenient for [Ferreira] to continue disseminating hate speech against trans people and trans activism because they purport to be protecting women and children,” Flores told Global Voices in a phone interview. “As if trans people are a threat to women and children. Trans people are used as scapegoats.”
Ferreira, a 29-year-old congressman who is conservative and religious, is well-known in Brazilian politics for using social media virality to gain visibility among the electorate. According to a study published in January by Zeeng, a company that researches online marketing strategies, he was Brazil’s most influential politician in the first semester of 2025, averaging 1,591,156 interactions per post on Instagram. With 22 million followers on Meta’s platform, he is the second most-followed politician in Brazil, behind only former President Jair Bolsonaro, his ally. Almost four years ago, he had 3.5 million followers.
A moral panic
In the last decade in Brazil, transphobia has become one of the main tools for disseminating misinformation, according to Caê Vatiero, a trans journalist and media researcher. “It’s a strategy of using a scapegoat to gain voters,” Vatiero told Global Voices. “Trans people are being turned into a moral panic so right-wing politicians can say, this is what we are fighting against.”
A few months after launching his attacks on Flores, Ferreira was elected to the Chamber of Deputies, securing 1.47 million votes, the highest total in the country in 2022. Much like Bolsonaro, Ferreira owes his online virality to speeches that feed off pre-existing prejudices in Brazilian society, according to Caia Maria, trans activist and program director at Intersexo Brasil.
“The right-wing camp does not elect itself by fooling the electorate,” Maria told Global Voices over a phone interview. “It merges with the desire of these voters to return to a society that has exterminated trans people from public life. [They want to] return to a time when trans women were afraid to go to the supermarket, to carry out the most mundane activities of their daily lives, because that was the case until the end of the 20th century.”
In addition to Ferreira’s video, Flores was also targeted by other right-wing influencers and politicians, who used the opportunity to increase their own social media engagement. She sued most of her detractors for libel and defamation, and Ferreira for “transphobia, hate speech, and an affront to human dignity,” according to court documents reviewed by GV. In November 2025, Ferreira was sentenced to pay 40,000 BRL (around USD 7,613) in damages to Flores. He can still appeal the decision.
After the decision, Ferreira commented on X (formerly Twitter) that it was now “a crime to call a man a man” and that he was “being punished for speaking the truth.” The post received over 1.3 million views.
“He ends up as a martyr,” Flores said. “It’s a type of marketing. It’s cheaper than a [political] campaign because, at the end of the day, he will promote himself as being ‘against the system,’ someone who wants to defend free speech, the traditional family.”
In the end, trans people are still affected by this speech in their day-to-day lives. “It affects all social aspects. Trans people aren’t able to rent a place to live, for example. We are being pushed further to the margins,” Vatiero said.
Global Voices reached out to Ferreira to ask about his use of transphobia online as a tactic for social media engagement, but did not receive a response before publication.
Viral phobia
There are limited studies on the use of transphobia as a tactic to gain visibility online in Brazil, but Caia Maria from Intersexo Brasil identifies the public rejection of any LGBTQ+ lifestyle as an old tool to appeal to the population at large in the political sphere, particularly during election year. Citing the first pro-dictatorship march in 1964, before Brazil’s military took over the country for 21 years, the “March of the Family with God for Liberty,” Maria argues that morally charged speeches performed for the masses are usually followed by attacks on democracy.
Adding the internet to the equation increases the potential for the spread of hate speech. “It’s important to talk about how the structures of Big Tech are built on racism and transphobia,” Vatiero said. “Their economic structure makes it easy for people to make money through the dissemination of transphobia. And today, people understand that it is extremely lucrative.”
Despite rising attacks, the 2022 elections were a watershed moment for trans women in politics. According to the National Association of Travestis and Transexuals (Antra) , there were 79 trans candidates that year, a rise of 49 per cent since the previous national election in 2018, when Bolsonaro was elected president. Overall, four trans women were elected in 2022: Erika Hilton and Duda Salabert to the National Congress, and Linda Brasil and Dani Balbi to their states’ parliaments in Sergipe and Rio de Janeiro, respectively.
Hilton and Salabert’s historical wins were followed by pushback. Research by Vatiero and Victória Ribeiro Carvalho at the São Paulo State University (UNESP) identified a pattern of transphobic attacks against both candidates. Between August and November of 2022, they found 665 transphobic posts directed at the politicians, questioning their gender or using masculine pronouns to refer to them. As elected parliamentarians, they continue to be targets of attacks.
City councilwoman Natasha Ferreira, elected in Porto Alegre in 2024, describes this rise in trans candidacies as a re-organization of the LGBTQ+ movement to “dispute spaces and sectors we previously could not dispute” as a response to Bolsonaro’s far-right and openly anti-LGBTQ+ political agenda.
Councilwoman Natasha Ferreira. Photo by Lucas Orso/CMPA. Fair use.
Natasha counters these attacks with an agenda she describes as “transparent,” “pro human rights, with an emphasis on LGBTQ+ populations,” and “guided by feminism as a tool for emancipation of the people.” The councilwoman believes her broad approach helps her combat or mitigate harassment.
“During my term, I chose not to be pigeonholed or reduced to the issues of the LGBT community,” Natasha said. “Because I believe that we, as LGBTQI+ people, take the bus, pay rent, and go to the market. The political stance I’m taking is a broader one: it’s about sitting at the decision-making table, and saying, look, my community isn’t represented here, and I don’t want to be in an LGBTQI+ [exclusive] table because I am not segregated from the rest of my city.”
About the author
Nicole Froio (Brazil) is a Brazilian-Colombian journalist and feminist cultural critic based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her work has been featured in international outlets including The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, The Verge, Bitch Media, Prism Reports, Dame Magazine, and Yes! Magazine, among others. She writes on the intersections of gender, politics, and culture, with particular focus on the weaponization of womanhood by far-right parties, trans moral panics, and abortion misinformation. Froio is the co-founder of The Flytrap, a feminist, worker-owned, and non-hierarchical newsletter.