Erika Hilton / CNN
A Brazilian member of Congress is not very happy with the U.S. State Department.
Posting on Instagram ealier this week, Congressman Erika Hilton revealed that his visa had been changed from “female” to “male” when he went to collect it.
Hilton had applied for the visa after traveling to the U.S. to speak at the Brazil Conference at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that took place earlier this month.
He explained the situation on Instagram, accusing Trump of a “hatred and fixation” against transgender people:
Yes, it’s true. I was classified as “male” by the U.S. government when I went to apply for my visa to attend the Brazil Conference at Harvard University and MIT.
I’m not surprised. This has already been happening with the documents of trans people in the U.S. for several weeks.
Nor am I surprised by the level of hatred and fixation these people have with trans individuals. After all, the documents I presented are corrected, and I am registered as a woman—even on my birth certificate.
In other words, they are ignoring official documents from other sovereign nations, even those of a diplomatic representative, just to dig up whether the person at some point had a different registration.
But at the end of the day, I am a Brazilian citizen, and my rights are guaranteed and my existence respected by our own constitution, laws, and jurisprudence.
And if the U.S. embassy has something to say about me, they can say it quietly, inside their building—surrounded on all sides by our Democratic Rule of Law.
What concerns me is a country ignoring official documents regarding the identity of its own citizens and altering them to fit the narrative and rights-stripping agenda of the current President.
Because this won’t stop with us or affect only trans people—the list of targets for these people is vast.
It was already being written when the first enslaved person was freed, when the first woman voted, when workers demanded their first raise, when Indigenous people reclaimed their land, when a Latino tried to get back a fraction of what was taken from him.
And that list of targets keeps growing. It’s part of a global political agenda of hatred, one that doesn’t stop at the U.S. border.
But here in Brazil, it’s a political agenda of hatred that we’ve already defeated once. And we’ll defeat it again—as many times as necessary.
The 32-year-old has had quite a backstory.
A former sex worker, he went on to study teaching and gerontology before entering politics as a Sao Paolo city councillor as a representative for President Lula Da Silva’s Socialism and Liberty Party.
He was also the first openly transgender person elected to the National Congress of Brazil and has become a cheerleader for socialism and progressive ideology.
