Erika Hilton wanted to celebrate whatever the outcome. She sent invitations to some 60 people for a big party at Largo de Arouche, São Paulo’s LGBT pole. Not even the far-right result of Jair Bolsonaro, much better than expected, tarnished the celebration. “For a few hours we forget that feeling of anguish and continue celebrating,” she recalls. She went to sleep at 8:00 and woke up two hours later to speak to the press. She was going to be one of the first two trans deputies in the history of Brazil, the deadliest country in the world for this group.
Just a few days have passed since the victory and Hilton (29 years old, Franco da Rocha) receives EL PAÍS in his campaign office. It is a little brick house in the Italian neighborhood of São Paulo. On the ground floor, there are a couple of alternative publishers and a capoeira association. The sound of berimbau and the tambourine sneaks into the office, where a feeling of electoral hangover still reigns. A mattress is pushed up against a wall and there are remnants of propaganda everywhere. “A transvestite in Brasilia”, “we are here to shine”, say the stickers.
The elected deputy shows no signs of tiredness. She wears a tight black dress and platform boots. Her nails add a touch of color. “It’s purple,” she says. “Pretty, right?” Make no mistake: There’s nothing frivolous about Hilton. During the next hour, the elected deputy, who is also black, describes a “devastating” panorama due to the rise of the extreme right and points to the need to build agreements with the conservatives so that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wins the second round of the elections. presidential. She speaks in a rush, with long sentences with hardly any pauses, as if she was very clear about where she is going.
The press first noticed Hilton in 2015. The bus company she used to go to college refused to put her chosen “business name” on her passenger card. At that time, Brazil still did not have legislation in this regard and transsexuals could not modify their official documents – that changed in 2016 during the Presidency of Dilma Rousseff. Hilton did not want to accept the refusal and went up to the website Change.org a public petition that received thousands of signatures in a few days. The company ended up changing its policy. “A lonely transsexual, without resources or lawyers, without a party, with nothing, she folded the company,” she remembers proudly.
Despite that first victory, official politics did not interest him. He saw her as an enemy. She wanted to burn flags, break everything. Until one day she changed her mind. “The absence of the trans was not a smart strategy because, while we continued to fuel the fire, shout and occupy the streets, they continued to pass laws that defined our destiny and the rights that we were going to have, but rights we did not have,” she says. . In 2020, she won a São Paulo councilor election with the highest number of votes in those elections. In the Assembly, she has managed to approve, among other things, the use of public toilets according to gender identity and the creation of quotas for access to municipal public services for transsexuals.
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Towards a hostile Congress
After her election as a federal deputy, Hilton’s fight rises to another level. A militant of the PSOL, a formation to the left of the PT, he has carried out a clearly progressive campaign: legal recognition of transfeminicide, legalization of abortion and equal marriage… He has also spoken of fighting hunger and raising the minimum wage, points that move away of a strictly LGBT agenda. “She removes that stereotype that we only know how to talk about our lives. I am not and will not be the deputy of the trans, or only of the LGBT community. I want to talk about the elderly, the environment, the precariousness of mothers…”, she points out.
Hilton recognizes that everything is not going to be achieved. And less in a context in which Bolsonarism, which attracted 43% of the votes in the first round, resists. Although the polls do not favor the current president, the deputy-elect fears a setback for LGBT rights. There is still the possibility that he will be re-elected and could nominate more “terribly evangelical” judges, as Bolsonaro once said, for the Federal Supreme Court. “It would represent an advance of the extreme right in the institution that guarantees what little we have today: minimum rights such as the right to change your company name without the need for surgery.”
In the federal Chamber of Deputies, in Brasilia, Hilton will face a space dominated by the right. Even so, she distinguishes between the conservatives, with whom she is willing to build agreements, from the “fascists”, with whom she “cannot negotiate”. Some of the newly elected deputies have expressed openly transphobic views. How will she deal with them? “With claw, with audacity, with bravery”, she answers. “I will probably be shocked, because the transphobic structures in that space will be extremely violent, but I am not going to let that destroy me. I intend to be a stone in their shoe, an inconvenience in their lives, and destabilize them much more than they me.
But before Brasilia there is a second presidential round to win and, for that, Lula has to attract the votes of the center. She plays “political realism,” says Hilton. “At this time when democracy is in danger due to the advance of fascism, silencing some points of the program is not due to confusion, but rather to strategy.” Lula’s alliance with vice-presidential candidate Geraldo Alckmin, whom Hilton calls a “disastrous figure on the Brazilian right,” is one example. “At least he is a Democrat. We have to attract the conservative voter, the one who thinks that Brazil is going to become Venezuela and that the communists are going to eat the children and the nonsense they say over there.”
Hilton glances quickly at her cell phone. “Let’s see what I have now. Ah, the act with Lula in Roosevelt Square! ”, He says. “I haven’t rested yet and I won’t rest until December.” He hopes that by then Lula will be about to hang the presidential sash. Thus, she will be able to celebrate the end of the year with the peace of mind of knowing that the rights for which she has fought so hard are a little safer.
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