Mick Hartley

Genevieve Gluck at Reduxx:

A woman in Brazil is currently under police investigation for “transphobia” after she posted a joke online about archaeologists being able to discern a person’s sex by observing differences in bone structure. Speaking at a women’s rights protest in Rio de Janeiro in April, Karen Mizuno revealed that she was notified by police that she was facing possible criminal charges because she had mocked a trans activist who had stated that “archaeologists are transphobic.”

Mizuno explained that her ordeal began after an article was circulated about Lucy, a well-known fossil of a female human ancestor which dates back approximately 3.2 million years.

“The situation was, there was an article going around about the bones belonging to the fossil of Lucy, and how the archaeologists found out that she was a woman, because of the pelvic bone,” Mizuno said. “Trans activists were saying that attesting that Lucy was a woman, because of her female pelvic bone, was transphobia. In other words, they said she could be a trans man. They really think that someone who lived three million years ago had a ‘gender identity.’ It’s an unreasonable argument, an anachronism.”

It's fucking ridiculous is what it is.

She continued: “I took screen shots of the tweet with these accusations of alleged ‘transphobia’ by the archaeologists, which said exactly the following: ‘This tweet reminds me of something I never see people talking about. Archaeologists are indeed transphobic. That so-called Lucy, for example, are they inferring she was a woman based on the bones alone? Does that mean that if I die, in 500 or 5000 years someone might disrespect my gender because of that?”

Mizuno took a screen shot of the comment and posted it with her own commentary, writing: “With each passing day, human extinction ceases to become a fear and becomes something to hope for.” Mizuno explains that it was intended to be a light-hearted joke.

She was informed later by the police that a criminal investigation had been opened into her comments.

Mizuno explains that police first became aware of her while they were probing the social media of Isabela Cêpa, another women’s rights activist who they were similarly investigating for criminal “transphobia.” As previously reported by Reduxx, Cêpa has been threatened with up to 25 years in prison for “misgendering” a transgender politician named Erika Hilton.

That previous Reduxx report is here.

Strange country, Brazil. 

Despite being a very conservative country, Brazil has some of the most extensive laws against transphobia in the world. In 2019, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled that discrimination against ‘LGBTQ Community’ constituted a penal offense, but fell under existing race-based protections as a form of “social racism.”