Brazil's October general election has 107 candidates who declared themselves transgender to the TSE, the country's top electoral court, according to a survey by the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo published on Saturday. Twenty of them are running for parties the paper classifies as center or right wing. Declaring gender identity on the candidate registry is optional, so the real total may be higher.
This is the first general election in which the TSE publishes statistics on the sexual orientation and gender identity of candidates. The fields were added to the registration forms in the 2024 municipal elections. Citing TSE data from August 18, the Senate's news agency reported that transgender candidates made up 0.51% of the 20,575 registered candidacies, and 53 people declared a social name to the court. On gender identity, 57.75% of candidates answered the question and 42.25% left it blank.
Where the candidacies sit
Most transgender candidacies remain in left-wing parties, Folha reports. Among those who informed the TSE of their identity, the PSDB has six trans candidates, the MDB has four, and Avante, Solidariedade and the PP have two each. Cidadania, União Brasil, PRD and Democrata have one each. The ideological ranking comes from GPS Partidário, a Folha index that places Brazilian parties from left to right based on how their lawmakers vote in Congress.
The case Folha highlights is Sophia Barclay, a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress, for the PL of São Paulo, the right-wing party of former president Jair Bolsonaro's allies. She did not declare her gender identity to the court and presents herself on social media as a "trans de direita antiwoke", a right-wing, anti-woke transgender woman. She told the paper why she left the field blank:
"It was not my choice [not to declare my gender identity]. I never even questioned it, and having that information there is not relevant. It is not something hidden: those who follow me know it, and those who do not will know once they start following me."
According to Extra, a Globo-owned outlet, Barclay joined the Novo party in December 2025 and left it in February, after voicing support for Flávio Bolsonaro's presidential bid, the former president's son, while Novo had launched Minas Gerais Governor Romeu Zema as its own candidate. She then joined the PL, where she was received by the party's national president, Valdemar Costa Neto.
What comes next
The first round is scheduled for the first Sunday of October. The vote will show how many of the 107 transgender candidates win seats in the Chamber of Deputies and in state legislatures, offices filled under Brazil's proportional system. The official count has a built-in limit, set by TSE rules: candidates who skip the gender identity question are not counted.