Despite advances, Brazil is still a dangerous place to be LGBTQ

Earlier this year, Brazil passed radical legislation allowing trans individuals to use their social names –the names which they are known by, rather than those on their birth certificates – on identity cards without first undergoing gender reassignment surgery. The move, which came after concentrated mobilization efforts from the trans community, has been widely praised. “This was a huge advance for the LGBTQ population that we were able to make in the Supreme Court,” said Dr. Gisele Alessandra Schmidt e Silva, a member of the Brazilian Lawyers’ Association’s sexual and gender diversity commission and a recent speaker at Brazil Conference at Harvard & MIT.

Schmidt, who was the first transsexual in Brazilian history to give a speech in the Supreme Court, lobbied hard to introduce the social name legislation. “It’s important exactly because it will mean avoiding the discomfort that invariably ends up violating a person’s dignity,” she explained to The Brazilian Report.

But violence against Brazil’s LGBTQ population remains shockingly high. A total of 445 deaths made 2017 the deadliest year since NGO Grupo Gay da Bahia began monitoring 38 years ago. Moreover, those numbers already represent a 30 percent increase from the previous year, and this year shows no signs of being different according to the NGO’s founder, anthropologist Luiz Mott.

“The statistics [for 2018] are unforeseeable,” Mott told The Brazilian Report, although he remains concerned that the incremental year-on-year increases in violence against LGBTQ Brazilians shows no signs of abating. “This recent increase is related to the general increase in crime in Brazil – the country is the fifth most violent in...