The All Too Familiar Case of Patrícia Lélis
Brazilian Journalist Takes on The Trans Lobby and Eduardo Bolsonaro
Patrícia Lélis is a former Brazilian congressional journalist who has been persecuted since 2018 because of her gender-critical views. Most notably she was targeted from within her own party, the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores) or PT. As a result of the attacks she currently holds no position in the PT but remains affiliated with the party and acts as a militant working against Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro.
When the video of the case of the Wi Spa in LA went viral on the internet, Lélis linked to the video on her social networks which gained about 50,000 views. In the description of the video she linked to on Instagram under her @patricialelis account, Lélis wrote the following:
In LA, a man who identifies himself as transgender who was in the WI SPA to use the women's bathroom that also had other women in it took off his pants and showed his penis to the women and teenagers in the bathroom.
To explain further: The man who identifies as transgender went to the women’s room, took care of his needs in a private stall, left the stall and in the lavatory area, took off his pants and showed his penis to three other women who were in the bathroom.
When questioning the SPA, the clients had the following response: “He has the right to use the women's bathroom since he identifies himself as a woman.” The situation generated revolt and confusion between the trans-identified man and the other women who were in the bathroom which later became a police case and also a reason for protests.
So, what is your opinion? Would you mind going to the ladies room and a trans-identified man takes off his pants and starts showing off his penis? Would you feel threatened?
Minutes after posting the video, Lélis started receiving death threats and hate messages. She tells me, “It was then that I decided to record an IGTV (Instagram TV) to talk more about the case and explain my viewpoint. In this video, I say that ‘being a woman is not a feeling’ and that people who play with the issue of gender are silencing women.”
If this story sounds familiar to you, you have likely been active on social media in recent years. Lélis’ case follows a familiar trajectory that many women around the world have faced—from Maya Forstater to JK Rowling to Selina Todd to many more women—and increasingly in recent months men—are being hounded out of their professions, housing, and social circles for stating a scientific fact.
Lélis recounts the incidents around her social media posts to me: “That's when things got worse and I started to be brutally attacked by men who identify themselves as transgender and my mother started to receive death and rape threats. Hours after all this happened, the PT Workers' Party decided to speak out and, in an abusive way, they accused me of being transphobic. After this, I started to receive even more threats of death and rape, to the point that my staff had to distance me from social networks so that I could maintain my mental health. I received attacks of all forms and in extremely cruel ways. Indeed, I experienced a new level of violence.”
Lélis tells me how she was born into a conservative, Christian and political right-wing family and how from the age of sixteen she started working within politics in Brazil, specifically with a pastor who was also a federal congressman, Marco Feliciano. In 2016 at the age of twenty-two, Lélis tells me how Feliciano raped her. When Lélis decided to report the rape, Feliciano concocted a fake psychological report with the help of a psychologist she had never before consulted, claiming that Lélis had mythomania, a psychological condition characterised by an excessive or abnormal propensity for lying and exaggerating. Despite the Brazilian courts having confirmed that the psychology report was falsified and forged by a psychologist who never consulted Lélis, she continued to be attacked for this false psychiatric report by trans activists who have attacked Lélis by referring to this fraudulent report.
In the aftermath of Lélis having been raped, she slowly shifted to the political left thinking that there she would finally have some political support in talking about women's rights. During her electoral campaign in 2018, Lélis discovered this was not to be. During her electoral campaign, she focused on women's rights such as the legalisation of abortion while criticising the high rates of femicide in Brazil. At all the campaign meetings, however, there were more men who identify as transgender than biological women. Lélis talked about this troubling fact publicly in addition to highlighting how biological women are silenced in politics. As a result of this discussion, a trans woman attempted to attack Lélis physically.
It was then that Lélis came into contact with radical feminism for the first time. She tells me, “I finally felt represented by a theoretical approach which placed the sexism and violence against women in a clear light. I felt that my agendas and women’s agendas were taken more seriously within radical feminism and I talked about it publicly in 2018. From that moment to the present I have been stalked by men who identify themselves as transgender and ‘sex work’ advocates. However, I feel like these issues have become so extreme that I now feel afraid to walk down the streets in my hometown of Brasilia.”
At the end of 2018, Lélis decided to leave Brazil after she discovered a prostitution trafficking ring working within the Brazilian National Congress. She tells me of the trans advocates who prostitute teenagers, women, and men who identify as transgender for Brazilian politicians. “I believed that my life would be safer in the USA. However, that was not quite the case,” she reports.
“In 2019 a woman named Janaina de Toledo who is one of the people responsible for this trafficking scheme used my data to call the police and report that I had cocaine inside my house. The police came to my house, found nothing, but absurdly they accused me of making a false police report. Logically the police lost their claim in court for a complete lack of evidence and the detective in the case was removed from the police. But no one from the police wanted to hear about the prostitution scheme I uncovered—a network that reaches as far as the United States—despite my having concrete evidence." Lélis made an FOI request to the police and was able to prove various communications between the detective in the case and Janaina de Toledo, which Lélis could not initially understand, asking: "Why the police did not investigate a woman who is known in Brazil for her involvement in prostitution and who traffics women and teenagers to the USA for prostitution? This I cannot understand," she confesses.
“The PT party has given the go-ahead for hate attacks against women,” Lélis tells me, “And now two men who identify themselves as transgender from the same party are calling for my expulsion. The most shocking thing about all this is that one of these men who identifies as trans is suing me because according to her I don't use the pronoun he wants me to use. Over three years of this nightmare and I feel tired. I'm tired of being silenced by men who feel their identity permits them to abuse women. In fact, I have never felt so tired and violated over these three years than have I when I discuss the importance of radical feminism.”
Since moving to the United States, Lélis has faced several lawsuits by trans activists in Brazil. While vexatious lawsuits are fast becoming a tactic of the gender lobby in the United Kingdom (ie. Stephanie Hayden), Lélis also recognises this as a tactic that is used widely by trans activists in Brazil as a way of shutting women up and frightening them from public speech. “In Brazil, I am sued frequently for the wrong use of pronouns and the crime of ‘transphobia,’” Lélis tells me. “In the USA they tried to sue me twice also for transphobia and once again I came out winning. This queer's group's project is to take women out of their spaces and to silence us. They want to speak for us.”
Lélis tells me about ANTRA, an organisation that defends trans-identified people, prostitutes and people who work with sex trafficking, "When I started talking about ANTRA's participation in prostitution cases involving parliamentarians, which even involves the pastor and federal congressman who raped me, ANTRA demanded my expulsion from the party, alleging the crime of ‘transphobia’.”
Lélis has worked to uncover the connections between sex trafficking rings and several high profile transgender activists. This led to her harassment by trans activists and also met the ire of the son of the president of Brazil, Eduardo Bolsonaro. Also a PSC (Social Christian Party) congressman, Bolsonaro sent Lélis a message on the Telegram app threatening her with death. Lélis recounts, “Bolsanaro said that if I reported this to the police he would take legal action against me.” Instead, Lélis pressed criminal charges against Bolsonaro in 2019 but because Bolsanaro is a politician, the Supreme Court of Brazil (STF) had to handle the case. the trial has has already taken place but Lélis doesn’t expect a sentence anytime soon, “Because he is the president's son, the process can take years to receive a sentence,” Lélis tells me. “While Bolsonaro is in power, as the judiciary in Brazil is very political, this case will only be sentenced when Bolsonaro leaves the presidency.”
Lélis confides to me that in the ten years she has worked within politics, one thing is clear to her: “Women are always silenced, whether on the political right or the political left. In these three years of openly defending radical feminism I have already lost a lot of money with lawsuits that my accusers never manage to prove the alleged crime of “transphobia” they accuse me of committing. I have never and will never advocate for trans people to be murdered and marginalised but I will also not allow them to accuse me of transphobia, a crime I have never committed. I still believe and defend that being a woman is not a feeling and I don't want to have to stop saying that ‘women menstruate’ because this fact might offend men who identify as transgender. It's not fair to me and women.”