brazil just sent three trans women to congress, and one of them got 1.6 million votes. we would like to be governed like this.

Erika Hilton (left) and Thabatta Pimenta. Photo: Kascyo, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

via the Washington Blade, Tribuna do Norte, O Tempo and the TSE's official results

1,596,472. That is how many people in São Paulo voted on Sunday for Erika Hilton, a trans woman, to go back to Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, according to the official count from the country's electoral court. Only one candidate in the state got more. And when the new Congress sits, she will not be the only trans woman in the room. She will not even be one of two.

who won

Thabatta Pimenta, a city councilwoman in Natal, was elected federal deputy for Rio Grande do Norte with the Green Party (PV), taking 92,743 votes. That makes her the first trans woman sent to Congress from that state and from the whole Northeast of Brazil, as Tribuna do Norte, O Tempo and the Blade all report. She was tenth in the state on raw votes and took its eighth and last seat on the party-share math Brazil uses to fill a delegation. A seat is a seat.

"O povo se levantou, e hoje elegeu a primeira travesti deputada federal do Nordeste brasileiro," she said, per O Tempo: the people rose up, and today elected the first travesti federal deputy of the Brazilian Northeast. (Travesti is a word Brazilian trans women have reclaimed, roughly the way "queer" was here.) "This isn't just my dream," she went on, in our translation. "It's the dream of many girls like me in the interior of the state."

Hilton, of the left-wing PSOL, was re-elected with that 1.6 million, and Duda Salabert, also PSOL, was re-elected in Minas Gerais with 229,535 votes, third in the state, per the TSE results and O Tempo. That is three trans federal deputies. Hilton and Salabert were both first elected to Congress in 2022. Four years later the novelty is gone, which is the entire point.

the rest of the map

It is not all confetti. Nikolas Ferreira, the far-right deputy from Minas Gerais, took 3,119,318 votes, first in his state, and Rádio Senado reports his party, Bolsonaro's PL, will hold 121 seats, the biggest bloc in the Chamber. "We built the largest young conservative caucus in the history of Congress," Ferreira said, in our translation of his quote to Rádio Senado.

So Brazil did both things on Sunday, which is what Brazil does. It handed its biggest vote to the far right, and it kept electing trans women in landslides. The trans advocacy group Antra counted 116 trans candidacies this year, per Diário de Pernambuco, and trans women also won state assembly seats in Rio Grande do Sul and São Paulo.

Meanwhile in the United States, one state legislature after another is debating which bathroom Erika Hilton would be allowed to use if she visited. She will be busy.