Today, Brazil is home to both some of the strongest trans rights protections and the highest rates of transphobic murders in Latin America. To explain this contradiction, Trans Brazil chronicles 150 years of Brazilian history through the everyday stories of trans people. José Amador reveals how anxieties about gender boundaries overlapped with fears of other “problem bodies,” including people of African descent, prostitutes, homosexuals, “women-men,” and suffragists. As global discourses of transness reached Brazil, trans people, doctors, and the media debated what sex, gender, and sexuality meant. Amid new and evolving definitions of embodied identities, homosexuals, travestis, transsexuals, and trans men sometimes shared spaces marked by homophobia and transphobia and at other times occupied distinct spaces in their struggles for recognition and rights.

Bringing this inclusive trans history into the early twenty-first century, José Amador illuminates how medicine, trans activism, and the state eventually established access to gender affirming care as a right, albeit one often denied. Tracing these social, political, and medical transformations and redefining historical assumptions about Brazil, Amador shows how policing those who challenged binary gender has been integral to state formation, and how gender-diverse and trans people were crucial to the making of modern Brazil.