A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

In 2024, Brazil was the country with the most reported murders of transgender people for the 17th consecutive year. This alarming rate of violence sparked the formation of AsBraba, which offers free self-defence classes to LGBTQ+ people, and André Aram spoke to the project’s founders to find out more. Photo by Piranhas Team.

In 2023 alone, there were 150 murders of trans people, according to data from the Brazilian NGO ANTRA (Associação Nacional de Travestis e Transexuais). Statistics such as these from years prior are what motivated Julio Cesar, 52, and Juarez Diel, 60, to found AsBraba (The Tough) in 2022. A couple for over 30 years, Julio is a black belt teacher, while Juarez is a historian and social activist. While one teaches how to defend oneself, the other is in charge of managing the project’s social networks and reinforcing its activism with political and social communication. Juarez believes that the defence of physical integrity and life is part of the militancy for the full existence of LGBTQ+ people. In this sense, selfdefence in situations of attack also serves to interrupt the normalisation of violence against LGBTQ+ bodies.

In the country of samba and football, the life expectancy of a trans woman is up to 35 years, so knowing how to defend yourself can mean survival. Krav Maga classes— which bring together specific techniques from different fighting styles—take place once a week in the city of Porto Alegre, in Rio Grande do Sul (southern Brazil), and have students of all ages, sexual orientations, and gender identities. There are 20 regular learners and another 50 drop-ins who can’t always attend classes due to other commitments. There are also two additional volunteer teachers. The room, located in the city centre and provided especially for the project, is equipped with mats, and the students are not required to wear kimonos. Julio mentions that as well as self-defence, they are also taught behaviour techniques to maintain calm and self-control in risky situations.

Similar projects have been pioneered in Brazil. For years, martial arts trainer Hal Paes was in charge of the Piranhas Team project in Rio de Janeiro, which was similar to AsBraba but with different martial arts disciplines and free only for trans people. However, due to a lack of financial support and the fact that the space was rented, classes were temporarily suspended in mid-2024. Created in 2016, Hal remembers the collective having a high number of students when former president Jair Bolsonaro won the country’s elections: “After the 2018 elections, whose political discourse openly defended violence against LGBTQ+ people, at that time we had five classes, three in Krav Maga, one in Kung Fu, and another in Jiu Jitsu, with 10 students in each,” he recalled.

The experience during the classes made Hal realise that there are differences between the types of violence applied: “Trans women suffer unjustifiable attacks on the streets in the most varied situations; gay men often suffer violence from small groups of aggressors, while lesbians, like other [cis] women, are more subject to domestic and sexual violence,” he analysed. Currently, AsBraba is the only project of its kind in the country. As Juarez points out: “It’s the only one that we know of, in terms of ongoing work, free of charge, without ties to any paid training institution, and exclusively for LGBTQ+ people; which is fundamental for us, so that people feel comfortable sharing their demands and affections in the dojo.”

Near the former Piranhas Team headquarters lives Darla Muniz, 28, a young trans woman who is president of an organisation that houses 17 trans sex workers who were in a situation of social vulnerability. She is well aware of the challenges faced by this population. In the past, when she worked on the streets, she saw first-hand the violence that she and other trans women were exposed to: “I remember that we were attacked with eggs and fire extinguishers when we were on street corners”.

The young woman still works on the streets sometimes, but today, she takes a few precautions: “To defend myself, I use the method of the American policemen; when I’m on the street, I carry pepper spray in my bag”. Martial arts have always been associated with the male gender, and fighting academies have always been seen as spaces for cis, straight, white men, not a very welcoming environment for LGBTQ+ people in general. In this sense, projects like AsBraba have emerged to break paradigms.

Julio and Juarez have never suffered violence due to homophobia; they are two big, bearded, and strong men, but when the couple created the project, they were essentially thinking about the people who are on this ‘radar of violence’ and their social fragilities. For them, defending vulnerable bodies is a political action. Therefore, when an LGBTQ+ person practices self-defence, it is so that they are not the victim.

“When we step on the mat, we are more than training; we are also agreeing not to die” - a sentence taken from AsBraba’s social media.

The students share the same opinion when it comes to the importance of this collective. “The project represents a concrete action to empower minority groups. It’s very important to strengthen ourselves in the face of a world that antagonises us,” says Jeferson Huffermann, 33.

Priscila dos Santos, 39, had to put the knowledge she had learnt in class into practice on one occasion. She was on her way to the toilet in the basement of a supermarket when she was approached by a man who grabbed her by the arm; she reacted by striking the attacker, then ran away and called security. “I’ve learned to be more attentive to my surroundings, to minimise risks; the project gives us the self-confidence to be able to keep calm and act if necessary. As a woman, I support everyone doing Krav Maga; in our daily lives, it’s very necessary,” she told GCN.

Asked how this form of self-defence, which uses short movements, works, Julio explains: “The targets we hit on the aggressor are sensitive points on the human body, such as the eyes, genitals, neck, and knees”.

Bodily conflict should be avoided; the aim is to neutralise the aggressor without getting into a fight. “It’s a kind of fighting without rules because you’re defending your life, and the aim is survival, and if we manage to escape and not get into a fight, it’s also Krav Maga; we don’t want to get into an unnecessary fight,” explains the teacher.

For learner Iuri Tinti, 28, the initiative represents feeling more protected: “It means being able to build a place where we no longer feel vulnerable, and that, if we need to, we won’t be the ones to fall,” he says.

Even with such projects, the question remains: How can we reduce homophobia and transphobia in Brazil? Education may be the key, but it needs to be extended beyond schools to other spaces. The training of health workers, security guards and the population in general, alongside inclusive public policies, are pointed out by the couple as a way of tackling this problem.

Many attacks go unreported because of distrust in the authorities; there is a fear of being harassed by the justice system, which is supposed to offer protection. It’s a set of actions that need to be taken, which requires broad mobilisation, especially by society.

Juarez says it’s a structural concern: “Brazil has more and more religious and moralistic speeches, which open up loopholes for attacks on the LGBTQ+ population; it’s a country with a Bible worktop in Congress; the rights already won by our community are always at risk.”

The journey is long and challenging, but the fight will never be given up. The couple has many plans to develop and expand the project even further in the future. One of the goals is to have their own, larger headquarters to serve more LGBTQ+ people and include cis straight women, as well as to train teachers to work with the community beyond Krav Maga and offer political literacy training for these professionals.

They emphasise that the project’s intention is not just to put an end to aggression, but to solve the social problems that put LGBTQ+ people in this position. For the time being, AsBraba has no sponsors, but they have managed to keep their work going with a lot of commitment and effort from the duo and their volunteers. As Juarez states, we will only put an end to a society that normalises the killing of trans people when we also manage to break down the structures that create this kind of behaviour.

The violence that puts LGBTQ+ people at risk is part of a social conditioning that jeopardises the lives of those who deviate from a supposed norm: cisgender, heterosexual, white, and male. These are lives that are at risk simply for existing. As such, AsBraba is a project that needs to exist and resist: “We fight to one day live in a social space where we don’t have to use violence proportional to what we’ve been attacked for in order to stay alive,” the couple concluded.