After a decade tearing up professional men’s volleyball leagues in Europe, Tiffany Abreu is used to taking on steep challenges. Fresh from becoming Brazil’s first transgender player, she is running for Congress in next month’s elections.
“Why not?” is the campaign slogan of a 33-year-old who has learned to face down discrimination in a nation struggling to curb violence against LGBT people.
Abreu is running as a candidate for the Brazilian Democratic Movement, the center-right party of unpopular Brazilian President Michel Temer, in the Oct. 7 election.
She has faced down criticism from the LGBT community over choosing to run for Temer’s conservatives, when most other candidates supported by the community represent leftist parties.
“I don’t give any importance to parties, but to people,” she said.
Her links to the party come through her club, Volei Bauru, which is sponsored by industries linked to the party.
Abreu shot to public attention in Brazil in December last year, when she became the first transgender person to play in the Superliga, the nation’s top women’s volleyball league.
As Rodrigo Pereira de Abreu, a career in men’s volleyball had taken her to Europe, where she played in Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium and France, but she says she has always felt the torment of being a woman trapped in a man’s body.
“For 27 years, I’ve been consumed inside,” Abreu said on a hotel terrace during a break between training and campaigning. “I wanted to make my transition when I was 12 or 13 years old, because even from childhood, I knew I was a woman, but I lacked information, guidance and above all, hospitals where I could get the operation done.”
Born into a poor family in the central town of Goias, Abreu finally transitioned in 2012 after a long bout of depression.
“I left a team where I was the second-top scorer in the championship [in the Belgian second division] to start the transition,” she said. “I could not live in that body anymore. I could not show that I was a man, when I was a woman. I couldn’t stand feeling ashamed of myself.”
Extensive hormone treatment followed in Europe, as well as a series of operations — the most recent coming in May in Spain to sharpen her features.
The return to play in Brazil was a bombshell, for Abreu and the Superliga. Women’s league players denounced what they saw as unfair competition.
However, she was allowed thanks to International Olympic Committee rules that permit transgender athletes to compete in women’s competitions if their testosterone levels in the bloodstream remain controlled.
It did not help that among her fiercest critics was Brazil’s Olympic bronze medalist Ana Paula Henkel, who said that Abreu had an unfair advantage of having trained in the sport as a man.
“It’s not a question of prejudice, but physiology,” Henkel said on Twitter. “Her body was built with testosterone all her life.”
Abreu, who is eyeing a chance to win a place on Brazil’s team for the Tokyo Olympics, has taken it in her stride.
“If I’m protected by the rules, why should I worry about what people are saying?” Abreu asked. “I have the impression that they are criticizing me out of jealousy, a little like Neymar.”
Despite their struggles for acceptance, 53 of the candidates in next month’s elections are transgender — compared with just five in the last elections.
Abreu is one of the few not to represent a leftist party, but she is hoping her example would help transgender people’s struggle for acceptance.
The stakes are higher than anywhere else. According to National Association of Transsexuals and Transvestites figures, Brazil has the world’s highest rate of trans murders, with 179 last year alone.
“When they offered to bring me back to Brazil, many people advised me to stay in Europe because of discrimination, but thank God things are starting to change,” Abreu said.
She said she knows that if she makes it to Congress, other obstacles lie in wait within the legislature itself, where diversity is far from the order of the day.
Her mother has given her blessing for the move into politics — on one condition.
“She told me: ‘Don’t become like those politicians who rob the people and who’ve done so much harm to the country,’” Abreu said.
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