The reaction on the right didn’t surprise anyone when the deputy (PSOL-SP) was elected by peers, with 11 votes in favor and ten blank votes. There was widespread outcry claiming that Hilton, the first trans federal deputy along with Duda Salabert (PDT), is not a woman at all. So far expected, given the aversion to transgenderism in the group.
But the discomfort was not restricted to this ideological playpen. In sectors of the left, his election also created splits. They are dissidents who say they are aligned with progressive agendas while still questioning whether a trans woman should lead the collegiate. The majority position in the field is to recognize trans women as women.
A thermometer: comments on a post by Minister Guilherme Boulos (General Secretariat) classifying the rejection of Hilton’s presidency as transphobia. “Extreme right, people? Around me, a truckload of left-wing women thinking this is absurd,” wrote psychoanalyst Ana Luiza Dalcanal.
Letícia Nascimento, who leads Sagrado Feminino Real, a project focused on “feminist spirituality that is based on the material experience of women”, also expressed itself: “gender critical” women would be “hostilized” and branded “right-wing fascists” by “pointing out inconsistencies in transactivism”.
This line of argument is anchored in opinions such as that of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women. For her, one can adopt a gender identity different from that at birth, but this does not imply automatic access to all the rights of “biological women”.
Alsalem was in Brazil on the eve of Women’s Day, and her position provoked rejection from the National Rights Council. Linked to the federal government, the group mentioned “radical social segments that flirt with transphobia and the demonization of trans bodies and subjectivities” when criticizing it.
Hilton, speaking about the wave of attacks on her, said she didn’t care about “the opinion of transphobes and imbeCIS”. Pun on “cis”, which is someone who identifies with the gender they were assigned at birth.
The perception that being born with a female reproductive system is inalienable to the female condition is often linked to the so-called radfems, or radical feminists.
. JK Rowling, creator of the Harry Potter series, is a notorious critic of the trans issue. In Brazil, Matria (Association of Women, Mothers and Workers of Brazil) defends the “importance of the sex marker” in this debate.
“Women are a group defined by a material reality, the female sex, and many of the existing public policies were built precisely based on this reality”, argues Clarice Saadi, director of the organization. And they run the risk of being relativized if this is not taken into account, according to her.
Saadi gives as an example the women’s penitentiary in the Federal District. “There are 86 male people housed in the women’s prison, and women report being embarrassed and harassed by transvestites who were transferred there based on self-declaration of gender,” she says, always using the male pronoun to refer to this group.
The new president of the Women’s Commission, in her view, would not approve a bill that vetoes the presence of trans and transvestites in these prisons. This is ignoring the “objective reality of women”, he says.
Letícia Nascimento, from the Sagrado Feminino Real project, follows the same trend. When we talk about women’s rights, we start with “bodies that are born under certain biological conditions and that, from this, are socialized in a patriarchal society to occupy specific positions, marked by structural inequalities such as reproductive control, sexual and domestic exploitation”.
Defenders of Hilton’s leadership argue that so-called biological women do not automatically represent all women, as experiences vary according to class, race and social context. A rich woman may not experience the problems of poor women, a white woman may not experience the problems of a black woman, etc. From this perspective, political representation should not be based only on identity, but on the ability to act on different realities.
Author of “When I Discovered Black” and columnist for Sheetsees the psolist as “doubly qualified” for the role: she is an elected parliamentarian and a woman committed to women’s rights. For her, discrediting her reveals transphobia, as there is no legal impediment to the position.
The psychoanalyst, also a columnist for the newspaper, goes further: being trans is not a burden, it’s a bonus, because Hilton “works with a minority within a minority”. In addition to being trans, she is black. “So we have a gender and race perspective. And she comes from a peripheral origin.” This way, I would be able to take a more sensitive look at such a marginalized group without disregarding cis and white women, he says.
Gynecologist Daniela Menezes, creator of Casa Caeté, focused on women’s health, says that, “from a medical point of view, there is no basis to say that a trans woman cannot represent women”.
Of course biology matters. No one denies the importance of prostate cancer screening in a trans woman, for example. “But these categories were not designed to define social role, identity or political representation.”
The female category would not be homogeneous in biology either. “Using medical arguments to define who can or cannot represent women is an undue extrapolation. Medicine describes bodies, politics organizes rights.”
Casa Caeté made a provocation in a post on Instagram: in 2024, the São Paulo councilors of the São Paulo City Council chose seven of them, all men, for the Health, Social Promotion, Labor and Women Commission. The noise was much less than Erika Hilton’s election now.
