Transgender Identities and Family Law

A Look Into Bills Presented at the Chamber of Deputies

Abstract

Like other minority groups, transgender people are often victims of prejudice, discrimination, hate speech, and other forms of violence, including physical violence, from many cisgender individuals, including state agents. An aggravating factor is the legislative persecution of transgender people in Brazil, a situation that has no parallel in any other minority group, with more than one anti-trans bill being introduced in legislative chambers throughout Brazil every day. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to point out potential impacts or consequences, or even relationships between congressional bills or legislative decrees of the Chamber of Deputies somehow associated with transgender issues and family law, from a multidimensional analytical perspective. Analytical narrative review was used based on bibliographic research in the Chamber's archive. About twenty bills and one legislative decree project were selected for analysis, focusing on four themes: annulment of marriage with a transgender person, "birth sex" on the marriage record, self-determination and protection of gender identity and expression, and protection of trans-affectionate families. In its final considerations, the paper observes that family law is one of the most impacted areas by the so-called anti-trans legislative wave in the Chamber of Deputies, and that even supposedly progressive projects poorly meet the aspirations of transgender people, something that, it is hoped, can be reversed after reflections on the topics discussed.