Brazil gets 2 transgender lawmakers in Congress for the first time

Rio de Janeiro, Oct 3 (EFE).- Brazil is set to have two transgender deputies in the Congress from 2023 following their victory in the recent elections, according to the official results that were made known Monday.

Erika Hilton won from Sao Paulo with more than 257,000 votes and Duda Salabert was elected from Minas Gerais with nearly 208,000 votes in Sunday’s election.

Hilton of the Socialism and Liberty Party and Salabert, a candidate of of the Democratic Labour Party, were elected to the Chamber of Deputies, or the lower house of the Congress.

Salabert voted Sunday wearing a bulletproof vest following threats due to her activism and political career.

Both of these newly elected deputies have served as councilors, Hilton in the city of Sao Paulo and Salabert in Belo Horizonte, the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, in the southeast.

National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA) president Keila Simpson, in an interaction with EFE, expressed happiness at the unprecedented achievement for their community, and stressed it was the result of an “extremely intense” campaign.

According to Simpson, the political participation of the transgender representatives in Congress will be a “hard battle” especially given that many of the new members of the Senate share a “religious and fundamentalist” ideology.

“While the result is positive, the elections present us a distressing picture especially in the Senate as some of the senators elected cannot coexist with the diversity that we have in Brazil,” she said.

This year, a record 76 transgender people contested elections in Brazil, 44 percent more than in the last time in 2018, according to data from ANTRA. EFE

mat/sc