As she has ventured throughout and beyond her native Brazil, the dream of leaving her little town to see the universe has come true. Today, she has another desire: to become 100- years- aged.
Given that the average life expectancy of a transgender Brazilian is alarmingly short, most people only reach 35 years old, it would be quite a feat to accomplish her centenary. But, on the verge of turning 58 — and given that her family is in her 90s — Keila Simpson is positive.
” I want to experience some of these things that I helped build in Brazil, because before, we did n’t even have the right to use our chosen names”! she recalls, during an exam with EL PAÍS. In Salvador, the capital of the northern state of Bahia, she sits on a covered porch to escape the summertime heat.
Her chosen brand — Keila— has defined her since she entered childhood. She began to roll up her clothes and tie her tops over her still-flat breasts at that point.
For decades now, Simpson has been an LGBTIQA+ activist ( an evolving acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual and other sexual identities ). She chairs ANTRA ( Associação Nacional de Travestis e Transsexuais do Brasil ), an organization that has gained recognition in Brazil and internationally. Since 2017, the team has been preparing the monthly statement on violence against” transgender women, transgender men, transmasculine and non- linear people”. It’s a thorough research filled with sad figures. The most recent report, which was released at the end of January, indicates that there will be 145 transgender Portuguese victims in 2023. This represents a yr- over- year boost of 10 %, although deaths in public decreased. The youngest sufferer was merely 13- years- aged. Nine of the assassins were identified as adult.
In the seven years since they began collecting data, ANTRA has recorded 1, 057 deaths of trans people in Brazil. That is, 151 a month, or 13 each month. This results in about one violent suicide every two weeks. Brazil ranks 15th in a row as the nation with the most murders committed against members of this area, far away of Mexico and the United States. This is according to Trans Murder Monitoring.
Simpson insists on the fake patrimony that drives her country. Brazil has more transgender people killed than any other country, despite the nation leading when it comes to online scans of the group. She explains the reasoning behind this:” ]People ] want a lesbian ( or travesti, a widely- used name in Latin America for a cross- drawer that is considered insulting by many ). They seek an unmoving object that will delight them. Therefore, they may abandon them”.
The gender distribution of transgender Brazilians who are murdered is obvious: they typically make a living as sex workers and are frequently murdered by strangers in public places. They are typically between the ages of 19 and 29 years older. And their execution methods are frequently incredibly cruel and unusual. Based on ANTRA’s broad network of collaborators and literary data, this thorough profile is constructed.
The two seats held by transgender people in the national Chamber of Deputies are among the group’s most recent accomplishments. In addition, two additional transgender women affiliated with the organization were elected to the state legislatures in Rio and Sergipe.
” I’m trans. My sex is female, because I claim a female identity. But I do n’t want to be a woman, nor a trans woman, nor a transvestite woman. I am, merely, a transvestite”, Simpson emphasizes. She even describes herself as a woman, the activity with which she made a life for decades. She shows that, in her situation, it was always a complimentary option, without a prostitute. She acknowledges, however, that a large proportion of sex workers are survivors of abuse and trafficking.
For someone like the leader of ANTRA, every day is an accomplishment. ” I do n’t know a centenarian trans person, ]or any who are ] 80- years- old. There’s another who’s reaching 70″, she notes.
Unlike the majority of the subjects that make up ANTRA’s data, Simpson was not kicked out of her residence by her relatives, who always supported her. She always kept in touch with her kids, her parents, and her six sisters even though she left her home of Pedreiras at the age of 13 in search of fresh perspectives. Yet today. Although her papa drank and was occasionally violent, she has always had a place to go back to where she has often been loved.
Despite having a very bad family, she had a happy youth in the Maranho landscape. ” We’re still bad”, she adds. The kids pounced on themselves by taking a creek bath and climbing trees. The neighborhood theater just ran movies for people.
When she started to desexualize her dress at the age of 13, she did so. The move started a continuous process that lasted for several years. ” We]altered ] our clothes with the children in the street. It was both a joke and a response to a society-predetermined state. You were a child and had to dress in a particular way. You had a tiny dick. She chose to get called Keila. Her companions went by the names Gardenia and Mayra.
The LGBTQIA + activist recalls two moments, both featuring her family as the hero, that exemplified the attitudes of those around her as she began to change. When a merchant removed some panties and placed them on my lower stomach, I was in the business with my family. He wanted to make fun of me, or perhaps he wanted to share something with my mother that she did n’t know. I was stunned, embarrassed. But this was my family’s effect: ‘ You should be afraid, Mr. Dorival. If he needs undergarments, I’ll get them for him!'” When Simpson finishes retelling this anecdote, she makes a note of the numerous subtle responses her mother, Doa Rosa, used to guard her.
The second incident occurred ten years after she and her companion, Bruna, left their homes and began to work as a woman and earn a living in Teresina and Recife, the two state capital of Piau and Pernambuco. She was frightened: it was Keila’s initial meeting with her family after a long time. ” I did n’t know what her reaction would be. If she called me Carlos ( her name at birth ), I would n’t have cared”, she points out now. ” But my family came over, hugged me and said: ‘ How are you, my child? With that movement, I was absolutely free”.
Simpson arrived in Salvador de Bahia in the middle of the 1980s as the military dictator was about to end. She has memories for that period because those who lived in the terminal city’s margins of world coexisted harmoniously. They worked at night on the street, without fear of shots. The police took you to the place, but they only let you out when you put on the male attire that was brought to you.
The AIDS illness, an unidentified illness that was treated like the plague, was occurring at this time. It caused prejudice against sexual minority all over the world. ” They stoned us, threatened to shoot us, hit us with baseball bat, yelled at us, saying that we were spreading AIDS to our kids”. At the time, she was living in a castle with 15 or 20 different transgender prostitutes, divided into several producers. That’s when she began her career as an advocate, handing out free contraceptives on behalf of Grupo Gay de Bahia, a pioneer object.
Thereafter, for a period of 42 years, she prepared the single monthly report on the deaths of LGBTQ people in Brazil.
” In the meetings, I saw that there were gay people]and ] one or two lesbians… but there were no]trans people ]”, Simpson recalls. But, in 1995, she created the first organization of this class. ” In fact, even then, being transgender was an affront to world. I believe that trans people and women, as well as all those names that have always existed, were at the time not able to say visibility.
She says she will politely and firmly urge someone to refer to her in the feminine tense if they refer to her as a man or as what trans people refer to as their “dead name” ( or name given at birth ). But it was n’t always like this, she explains. ” This debate only gained more strength when, in Argentina, they began to argue about whether]trans men ] could be identified with the female gender”.
This raises a conflict between Simpson and ANTRA and the Portuguese government. The current administration of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who they believe is a friend of the LGBTQIA + community, has continued to introduce national identity cards, a project that the administration of Jair Bolsonaro ( 2018- 2022 ) suggested. This seems terrible to them, considering that it was implemented by the original far- proper leader, a declared foe and noted transphobe.
” They ( Lula’s people ) promised us that the new card would n’t ]include ] sex or cause an issue about ]registering chosen names rather than given names ], things that Bolsonaro wanted. It’s a setback”! Simpson explains. A working group suggested that biological sex should n’t be on national identity cards at this time and that, in the case of transgender people, those cards should only list their chosen names. Last year, some 3, 900 LGBTQIA + Brazilians officially changed their names before a notary.
Simpson, a world traveler who spent a few years in Italy, had an irritating encounter in Mexico a few years back. She was invited to participate in the World Social Forum, but customs officers noticed her passport and her natural brand at the airport. She was deported, despite having all the evidence to show her personality. She claimed that the expulsion was the result of stigmatization.
The activists from ANTRA are anticipating a new federal initiative that will provide transgender people with specific care. A few hundred Brazilians undergo treatments and therapies every year for what is actually called” physical change” or “gender encouragement”. Next year, the public health system performed 65 therapies, according to the Brazilian Ministry of Health. Although the data does n’t distinguish between sexes, some studies believe that the majority of surgeries involved people changing from being men to women.
” Our punishment is to grow aged” is one of Simpson’s principles. She has her sights set on 2066… the year of her 100th day.
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