Erika Hilton is a Black trans woman and federal deputy for São Paulo who became Brazil's most-voted female politician after her re-election to the Chamber of Deputies in October 2026. Disowned at 15 and forced to survive through sex work, she built a political career defined by labour rights, women's equality, and LGBTQIA+ advocacy, in the country with the highest recorded number of transgender murders in the world.

Who is Erika Hilton?

She was born Erika Santos Silva in Franco da Rocha, on the outer edge of São Paulo. She grew up in Francisco Morato, a neighbourhood she describes plainly as poor and, at times, troubled. Her mother took her to the evangelical church, and it was there, among the faithful and the sermons, that she learned to speak in front of people. That skill would carry her a long way.

When she came out at 15, her mother disowned her. For four years she had no home to return to, and she survived through sex work. Her mother eventually brought her back. "My mother is wonderful," she said later. "I owe everything I have to her." That sentence is worth pausing over, because it tells you something about who Erika Hilton is: someone who does not simplify her own story to make it easier to consume.

She went on to study pedagogy and gerontology at the Federal University of São Carlos. She did not graduate, but she did something memorable while she was there: she gathered a hundred thousand signatures in two days to challenge a company that was refusing to put her social name on her student transit card. Brazil's Socialism and Liberty Party noticed, and invited her to join.

The political record

In November 2020, Hilton was elected to the São Paulo Municipal Chamber. She was the first trans woman to win a seat there, and also the most-voted female city council candidate that year. Six years on, she has been re-elected as a federal deputy with 15.9 lakh votes, a figure that made her the most-voted woman in the entire chamber.

Since taking her federal seat in 2023, she has authored over 100 legislative proposals. At least 26 of them relate to women's rights. She has platformed LGBTQIA+ equality, labour protections, racial justice, and social welfare, not as separate causes to be traded off against one another, but as things that are plainly connected when you have lived her life.

The achievement that drew the most attention in the outgoing legislature was her campaign against Brazil's so-called 6×1 schedule, a working pattern in which employees work six days and rest for one. Hilton led the push to change it, and on 14 October a constitutional amendment passed giving crores of workers a second paid day off. "People cannot live to work," she told a congressional committee. "They need to work to live." A constitutional amendment, passed. That is not a speech, that is power.

In March 2026, she took on the presidency of the Women's Commission of the Chamber of Deputies. In her address, she was direct about what the role demanded. "We are committed to Brazilian women. To confront patriarchal and misogynistic violence, because Brazilian women are concerned about how to defend their bodies, how to put food on their tables, how to report aggressors without them returning."

What she is doing this in the face of

Brazil recorded 80 murders of transgender people in 2025. That figure is the highest of any country in the world. Hilton herself has received multiple death threats and faces routine racial and gendered abuse online. She is not operating in a hospitable environment. She is operating in one of the most dangerous countries on earth to be who she is, and she is doing it at the highest level of democratic life.

She describes herself in her own words, and they are worth quoting in full rather than paraphrasing: "I am a woman who was expelled from home as a youth, who turned to sex work to survive, who lives in a country that still hates my presence — the last country in the world to abolish slavery. I am a woman, I am Black, I am a transvestite and the daughter of the working class."

She uses the word transvestite, the Portuguese travesti, deliberately. It is a reclamation, not an error, and it signals something about her politics: she does not sanitise her identity for the comfort of people who would rather not think too hard about it.

Why this matters beyond Brazil

When Lula defeated Flávio Bolsonaro on 26 October 2026, Hilton's name trended alongside his. People were celebrating her re-election, her margin, her record. And what struck me reading about this was not the symbolism, though the symbolism is real. It was the specificity.

Erika Hilton is not representing what trans people could achieve if conditions were different. She is representing what one trans person has achieved in conditions that are actively hostile: homelessness, sex work, death threats, a country with the world's highest trans murder rate. And she has, within that, changed the constitution, chaired a national commission, and won more votes than any other woman on the ballot.

Trans people have always been present in political life, in community organising, in the labour movement, in the church, in every space where human beings gather and try to make things better for each other. What is different now is that in Brazil, one of them is at the table where laws are written, with nearly 1.6 million people behind her, and she is using that position to fight for workers who will never know her name.

"Isso é HISTÓRIA," she wrote after the election results came in. This is history. And each of you helped write it.

She is right.