Trans Brazil

Brazil is home to both some of the strongest trans rights protections and the highest rates of transphobic murders in Latin America. Unraveling this contradiction, Trans Brazil chronicles 150 years of Brazilian history through the everyday stories of trans people. Historian José Amador reveals how anxieties about gender boundaries overlapped with fears of other “problem bodies,” including people of African descent, prostitutes, homosexuals, “women-men,” and suffragists. As global discourses of transness reached Brazil, trans people, doctors, and the media debated the meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality. In their struggles for recognition and rights, homosexuals, travestis, transsexuals, and trans men sometimes shared spaces marked by homophobia and transphobia and at other times occupied distinct positions as their identities became a political battleground.

Bringing this inclusive trans history into the early twenty-first century, Amador illuminates how actors in medicine, trans activism, and the state eventually established access to gender-affirming care as a right, albeit one often denied. Trans Brazil traces social, political, and medical transformations to show how gender-diverse and trans people have been crucial to the making of modern Brazil.