(LifeSiteNews) — While progressive groups decry the Trump administration’s ongoing purge of gender ideology from the federal leviathan and growing pushback against the transgender agenda in the United Kingdom, crackdowns on dissent from gender ideology continue in other countries.
In Brazil, a university administrator and a female janitor are facing up to five years in jail for the fictitious crime of “social racism” after being reported to the police for “transphobia” by a transgender-identifying male student named “Odara” Moraes, who was furious after being asked to use the male restroom on October 14, 2022, at the Federal University of Paraíba.
Moraes went into one of the female bathrooms on campus, clearly identifiable as male, wearing a crop top and a miniskirt. Moraes was asked by a female janitor, who spoke to Reduxx on the condition of anonymity, to leave. (Reduxx refers to the janitor, in their reporting, as “Luiza” to protect her from being targeted by transgender activists.) Despite the fact that he was asked politely and the janitor had meant no offense, Moraes promptly went to the police to complain of transphobia.
As Reduxx reported:
“That day, I was backup. I did have a fixed department, but I had asked to be placed on technical reserve as floating staff so I could work in different areas of the campus and make new friends,” Luiza explains. “I’d worked at [the University] for almost nine years, and I had never experienced an issue like this before. It was always ‘female bathroom’ and ‘male bathroom.’”
“I didn’t mean to offend anyone or hurt anyone. I just spoke to him politely, and I was politely bothered. Because it was a female space, not a male one. I was simply speaking about a fact, about a right — my right as a woman to defend our space, a female space. I had never seen anything like that before — a man using a women’s bathroom,” she says. But Moraes immediately became combative, pulling out his phone to begin filming her and calling her “transphobic.” He also demanded that she refer to him with feminine pronouns.
Moraes “demanded to speak with campus administration” and was taken to the office of Luiz Adripaulo, the university administrative director; on the way there, Moraes “continued to lambast [Luiza], calling her names and accusing her repeatedly of transphobia.” The meeting with Adripaulo only heightened his anger:
Adripaulo attempted to de-escalate the situation, but Moraes refused and instead repeatedly asserted that he would call the police and press charges against Luiza for “transphobia” – a criminal offense in Brazil. Unsure of what to do, Adripaulo asked Moraes if he had any legal documents proving he was a woman, but Moraes responded that his “word” should simply be enough. After being “misgendered” by Adripaulo, Moraes stormed out of the office screaming that he had been “discriminated against.”
On October 18, 2022, both Adripaulo and Luiza were told by police that they were being investigated for transphobia. “In my 41 years, I had never set foot in a police station in my life. It was the first time. And I was worried — I thought about my children, my family. It was the kind of worry any parent would have. I never imagined something like this would happen to me,” Luiza told Reduxx.
Adripaulo concurred. “I came to work feeling discouraged, almost angry, struggling to avoid depression and not pass on the psychological and emotional pressure I was experiencing to my subordinates. I became distracted from my work activities and fell behind on many tasks.” The threat of legal ramifications merely for affirming the observable, biological truth was bewildering and disorienting for both.
Moraes’s accusations became the catalyst for a broader campaign of harassment, with “trans activists on campus, likely under the instruction of Moraes,” spreading the allegation that Adripaulo was “fascist” and spray-painting graffiti outside his office. Luiza, too, felt backlash. “I actually saw many people start distancing themselves from me. No coworkers supported me — not to say I was right or wrong, just nothing. Everyone who approached me said I was wrong. That I shouldn’t have spoken up, that I shouldn’t have gotten involved, that I should’ve just not used the bathroom or whatever,” she told Reduxx.
Early the following year, Luiza’s contract was not renewed by the third-party employer she worked with. For the first time in nearly 10 years, she was suddenly out of work.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know if that’s why I’m still unemployed. I’ve even applied for unemployment, but still nothing. And I also have a five-year-old daughter. It’s hard to find a job because I can only work during the hours she’s at daycare — from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. And there just aren’t many jobs with those hours,” Luiza said. “Monday to Friday is especially hard. My husband works, my son works too. I have no one to watch my daughter.”
“Emotionally, my family and I were devastated, we didn’t know how to react. My wife cries in the early hours of the morning; One day I woke up, she was crying on the sofa,” Adripaula told Reduxx. “I made a tremendous effort not to let my children and wife notice what emotional state I’m in right now.”
Both were charged in October 2024 of “aggravated prejudice” and “social racism,” which Reduxx notes is “an offense created by Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2019 when it found that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity was in fact covered under already pre-existing anti-discrimination laws relating to race or national origin.” Their trial began in March 2025; a decision is expected soon. As previously noted, their “transphobia” could result in prison sentences of between two and five years. The two are currently being assisted by the women’s rights organization MATRIA Brazil, which seeks to defend sex-segregated spaces.
Progressive groups and mainstream media organizations, meanwhile, have not uttered a peep about these political prosecutions. CNN recently bemoaned the fact that the Trump administration is taking an “all-government approach” to rooting out gender ideology. Not mentioned, of course, is what the “all-government approach” to implementing gender ideology looks like—innocent men and women, prosecuted and persecuted under the new rules of an ideology that almost nobody had heard of two decades ago.
