Janaína Dutra, the first trans lawyer in Brazil, is honored by Google

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The trans lawyer and activist from Ceará who fought for LGBTQIA+ rights, Janaína Dutra (1960-2004), was honored by Google this Tuesday, November 30, the date on which she would turn 61 years old. The information comes from G1.

According to Deidiane Souza, director of Rede Trans Brasil and former coordinator of the LGBT Reference Center Janaína Dutra in Fortaleza, “Janaína Dutra is a great reference in the human rights movement in Brazil” and left a great legacy for the entire population.

“Janaína Dutra is a great reference in the human rights movement in Brazil. We need to give her the dimension she has not only as a trans activist, who occupied some super important functions of this activism locally here in Ceará, but also nationally”, says Deidiane.

She gained notoriety for being the first trans person to obtain a professional card from the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB). She died in 2004, aged 43, from lung cancer.

“She names important spaces of struggle, resistance, affection, but she is also in our memories, in our daily lives, as the great activist she always was. She doesn’t die, her legacy is in each one of us, as well as in the next ones to come. Janaína is struggle, activism, affection”, completes Deidiane.

Activism and pioneering

Known for carrying with her a copy of the anti-homophobia law passed by her hometown, Janaína has spent her entire life participating in conferences, seminars and roundtables to defend equality

Throughout the 1980s, she began to devote her time to the causes of LGBT people and those living with HIV. She was an active participant in the construction of the Asa Branca Support Group (Grab), whose creation is the founding mark of the movement for free sexual orientation and gender identity in Ceará, she was co-founder (1989), legal advisor and vice-president (mandates 1995, 1997, 1999, and 2001) of the entity. In the Asa Branca Support Group, she participated in several projects, including ‘Somos’, which worked on the prevention of STIs/AIDS.

She also founded, together with the trans activist Thina Rodrigues, the Associação das Transvestis do Ceará (Atrac). Dutra was also president of the National Articulation of Transvestites (Antra) and member of the National Council Against Discrimination, and in this she helped in the creation of Municipal Law 8.211/98, a law that curbs and punishes LGBTFobia in commercial and industrial establishments, service providers and similar, who discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation in Fortaleza.

Along with the Federal Government, Janaína Dutra helped in the construction of the “Brazil without Homophobia” program and carried out pioneering work with the Ministry of Health in the preparation of the first AIDS prevention campaign specifically aimed at trans people