Legal instruments are being waged in a new offensive against the trans community.
By Bruna G. Benevides, originally published in Portuguese at Portal Catarinas.
In recent years, Brazil has witnessed the emergence of a new strategy to attack human rights: anti-trans lawfare. This involves the calculated use of legal instruments—civil lawsuits, extrajudicial notifications, representations, and technical opinions—as a political weapon to restrict, wear down, and intimidate the trans community.
Under the guise of “defending women and children,” this practice has become one of the main pillars of the anti-gender ecosystem in the country and has connections to far-right movements around the world.
The mechanism is sophisticated. Instead of promoting historical feminist causes—such as fighting domestic violence, equality in the labor market, or reproductive rights—entities and profiles that self-declare themselves as defenders of women and children have prioritized actions to restrict gender self-determination, question quota policies in universities, bar the use of social names, and prevent trans women from accessing bathrooms, sports, and public policies.
In this context, the law is converted into an ideological trench: instead of ensuring constitutional guarantees, it is used to deny them.
Recent cases glaringly illustrate this logic. We have seen a series of attempts to suspend recent achievements, such as trans quotas in federal universities and civil service exams, to prevent specific health policies, and even to sue official bodies for recognizing the alarming situation of violence and human rights violations against trans people in Brazil.
Although court decisions have rejected some of these initiatives, this offensive fulfills a key role: to wear down collectives, delegitimize scientific data, deny the material reality in which trans people live, pressure government institutions, and spread moral panic by echoing the anti-gender policies of the far right.
The goal of the groups resorting to these legal strategies is not only to win a lawsuit, but to create an atmosphere of doubt and insecurity around transgender citizenship, with the aim of restricting rights and denying gender diversity.
This strategy is connected to an international network financed by ultra-religious and far-right groups. The rhetoric used replicates arguments also circulating in countries such as the United States, as for example Donald Trump’s anti-trans executive orders or the Skrmetti case US Supreme Court decision, which banned gender-affirming care for minors, but also other laws and court decisions that have been restricting the rights of trans people in sports, access to healthcare broadly speaking, specific social protection, and even the very existence of trans children.
In the United Kingdom, a recent court decision based on “biological sex” ruled that only two genders would be legally recognized. In Brazil, these narratives are being widely replicated and find resonance among parliamentarians aligned with Bolsonaroism, the far right, and ultra-conservative groups that operate in municipal and state legislatures, at the Congress level, as well as in other state institutions, whether in the executive or judicial branches.
In addition, anti-trans digital profiles and groups feel empowered and supported by waves, especially the collectives run by cisgender activists and radical trans-exclusionary feminists.
The result is a proliferation of setbacks in terms of regressive narratives on gender identity, increased dissemination of fake news and misinformation, attacks on public policies that have been achieved, government retreats in guaranteeing rights, and the massive proposal of bills that seek to prohibit trans rights and naturalize the essentialist idea of “biological sex” as the only valid marker in public policies.
The impact is profound. In a country that leads global statistics on murders of trans people and where social marginalization is structural, anti-trans lawfare adds another layer of violence—this time symbolic, bureaucratic, and institutional. This is particularly insidious when we consider that the judiciary has been the main defender of LGBTQIA+ rights in the face of legislative omission and the executive branch’s lack of commitment to these rights.
Each petition filed, each lawsuit, carries the weight of transforming human rights into mere contestable opinions, emptying the meaning of the struggles for LGBTQIA+ rights, and paving the way for transphobia to be relativized.
The consequence is the weakening of guarantees recognized by the Federal Supreme Court (STF), such as in the decisions of Direct Action of Unconstitutionality (ADI) 4275, which ensured the right of transgender people to change their name and gender in the civil registry without the need for surgery or judicial authorization, but also the Injunction Mandate 4733 that together with Direct Action of Unconstitutionality by Omission (ADO) 26, criminalized homophobia and transphobia by equating them to the crimes of racism provided for in Law 7.716/89.
This trend warrants greater attention, particularly at a time when the Supreme Court is under an intense attack waged by the extreme right.
This attack also targets the protections established by international treaties to which Brazil is a signatory, such as the Opinion 24/2017 attached to the American Convention on Human Rights and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), which have broadened the meaning of human rights to guarantee specific protections for transgender and gender-diverse people around the world.
The challenges, therefore, are enormous. It is therefore urgent to ensure the effective compliance with the decisions of the STF and their proper application, strengthen institutional resistance against this predatory use of the law, ensure that public figures, political parties, social and popular institutions, universities, courts, and public agencies are not captured by anti-trans narratives, expand measures of protection and access to justice and basic rights, guarantee the production and official validation of data on the trans reality, and ensure legal protection mechanisms for trans movements, collectives, and their allies.
More than just reacting to lawsuits, we must recognize that we are facing a global strategy that employs legal formalism to legitimize exclusion, undermine institutions, and erode achievements.
International experience shows that anti-trans lawfare is not just a clash over terminology, theoretical differences, or the scope of specific policies. It is a coordinated and well-funded global far-right movement that seeks to turn trans people into symbolic enemies to justify setbacks in the rights of women, the LGBTQIA+ population, and, ultimately, democracy itself.
The immediate target may be gender identity and gender itself, but the collateral effect is the erosion of equality and dignity as foundations of the rule of law.
At a time when hard-won rights are under constant threat, the warning is urgent. Anti-trans lawfare cannot be normalized as part of the democratic game, because it is not. It operates to undermine the recognition of subjects of law and to weaken the foundations of pluralistic coexistence.
Breaking with this ongoing trend is urgent and requires vigilance, mobilization, and collective courage to affirm, without concession, that trans rights are human rights. And they are non-negotiable.