Report analyzes anti-gender policies and the rise of conservative agendas in Brazil

The document proposes responses to the offensives based on international human rights law

A ministra Damares Alves (Mulher, da Família e dos Direitos Humanos) faz esforços contra à perspectiva de gênero desde o início de sua gestão. Foto: Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil

At a hearing in the Lower House of Congress in 2019, the foreign minister at the time, Ernesto Araújo, likened women’s reproductive rights to a sharp blade. “You have a cake and inside this cake there is a razor blade. I want to open this cake and remove the blade. What is this cake? Women’s health, women’s rights. Now, there’s a razor inside, which is abortion, which has to be discussed as part of another discussion, in accordance with national legislation, which punishes abortion,” he said.

This incident was recalled by Gustavo Huppes, international advocacy advisor at Conectas, in October, during the online event for the launch of the report “Anti-gender offensive in Brazil: State policies, legislation, social mobilization”, as one of the countless attacks on gender perspective. And it is precisely these attacks that are analyzed in the recently launched document.

“Anti-gender offensive in Brazil” was created by local partner organizations such as Conectas, Observatory of Sexuality Policies, Educational Action, the Brazilian Association of Gays, Lesbians, Bisexuals, Transexuals and Intersex People (ABGLT), the National Association of Transvestites and Transsexuals (ANTRA), the Latin American Council for Women’s Rights, the Human Rights and LGBT+ Citizenship Center of the Federal University of Minas Gerais and the international organization IPAS.

Originally written in English, the report was drafted in response to an appeal made by Victor Madrigal, UN Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights, for civil society organizations to contribute by creating a report on the topic. The document, which has now been released for the first time in Portuguese, attempts not only to identify but also to offer solutions for the offensives, by drawing on international human rights law. As Paulo Mariante, of the ABGLT, pointed out at the launch of the report, it is a “very important instrument to guide our actions based on a series of perceptions”.

Read more:

• Interview: The anti-gender offensive as state policy
• Article: Without Trump and Ernesto Araújo, will Brazil resume its historic commitment to debate gender in the UN?

According to Huppes, of Conectas, who recalled the anti-gender offensives in the area of foreign policy, the alignment between the Ministry of Foreign Relations and the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights represents an alarming alliance. “After the fall of Ernesto Araújo and the toning down of the rhetoric by Carlos França [his replacement], we have seen the Ministry, particularly through the figure of Angela Gandra [Secretary of the Family], taking on a paradiplomacy in defense of this conservative agenda and attempting to give Brazil leadership in this field,” he observed.

The efforts of the Ministry of Women, Family and Human Rights are clear in cases such as the 11-year-old girl from the town of São Mateus, in the state of Espírito Santo, who got pregnant after being systematically abused by a relative. The report notes that, even though the law permits terminating a pregnancy in such a case, religious groups who oppose sexual and reproductive rights and other actors created almost insurmountable obstacles to prevent the procedure, with the direct intervention of senior officials at the Ministry.

The lawyer Beatriz Galli, of IPAS/CLADEM, pointed out that other setbacks in reproductive health, namely systematic and persistent barriers that prevent access to legal abortion services; attacks on the use of telemedicine; and the significant reduction in the number of these services, with only 55% of hospitals offering legal abortion services in 2019 still operating in 2020. In the legislative sphere, Galli noted the existence of 72 bills aimed at restricting access to sexual and reproductive rights in general.

Anti-gender atmosphere

Professor Marco Aurélio Prado, of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), explained that for this “ultra-conservative organization, everything that is considered a state policy is normally seen as a requirement, which limits the action of the government”. According to this idea, it is necessary to redefine and destroy the old foundations for the construction of a ground zero, “a new society of conservative values”. “A good example are the councils, which are state policies, and which have been destaffed, transformed, restaffed and destroyed by government policy. In other words, pursuing this idea of rebuilding from ground zero, which obviously excludes gender and sexuality diversity,” he said.

These offensives are evident in education, as Denise Carreira, from the organization Educational Action, pointed out there are more than 100 legislative bills that explicitly ban gender issues from being addressed at schools. Militarization, self-censorship in schools and the new guidelines of the National Textbook Program are other examples. “It is important to recall that the ultra-conservative movement has an element of political influence, a very strong element of state capture, and also a third element, which is like a cultural movement that underpins daily life, based on fake news, disinformation and encouragement of moral panic, which generates all this atmosphere of anti-gender, anti-race and anti-sexuality agenda,” said Carreira.

Legacy of human rights

According to Bruna Benevides, of ANTRA, the agenda that dehumanizes trans people is central to this process. It is no wonder that Brazil is still the country in the world that most kills these people. “The dictatorship was not just a civilian-military and a media dictatorship, it was also in defense of gender normativity and heterosexual and cisgender sexuality. This demonstrates that what we are currently seeing – a militarized, pro-Bolsonaro government that praises torture and, more importantly, the dictatorship – is associated with the anti-gender policies of the past, which have once again taken shape and are being publicly disseminated and accepted by groups that organize to undermine the rights of people who in the past were completely invisible, to the point of being dehumanized,” he said.

While recalling that trans women and transvestites are part of the key population for developing an efficient response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Brazil, Sônia Corrêa, research associate at ABIA (Brazilian Interdisciplinary AIDS Association) and co-chair at Sexuality Policy Watch, pointed out the importance of including the issue of HIV in a new version of the report, which is intended to be a living document, which monitors the offensives.

According to Corrêa, principles such as freedom and autonomy are under attack, and being replaced by “a normative logic of protection of the vulnerable centered on the family and not on people”. “In my view, we are not facing an anti-rights position, but rather a neoconservative cleansing of the epistemological foundations of human rights. And this is a strong sign that the very field of human rights itself is in dispute, both in Brazil and internationally,” she said.

In this regard, the researcher pointed out the remarkable coincidence that the document had been released on October 20, the same day that Jair Bolsonaro was accused of crimes against humanity – and eight other accusations – in the final report from the Covid Inquiry in the Senate. This is because the discussions involving topics such as genocide and crimes against humanity “are a fundamental legacy of the intellectual and political journey that gave rise to the debate and the process of applying human rights from 1948 to the present day”.