TSE banned Bolsonaro from talking about unisex bathrooms

On October 20 last year, 10 days before the second round of elections, the president of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), Alexandre de Moraes, prohibited former president Jair Bolsonaro from warning voters about the risk of implementation in schools Brazilian women, of the “unisex bathroom”, if President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva won the election.

This Friday (22), the federal government’s Ministry of Human Rights published a resolution ordering all educational institutions, public and private, to ensure that students use bathrooms, changing rooms and any other space separated by gender, in accordance with with their “gender identity and/or expression”. It means, in practice, that a boy who identifies as a girl will be able to use the girls’ bathroom.

Last year, in a live broadcast on October 16, Bolsonaro warned: “Soon this party will [PT]which wants gender ideology, wants unisex bathrooms for our children in the classroom, has no commitment to the family, wants abortion, wants to legalize drugs, this party that is now acting like a moralist, accusing me… ”.

Two days later, on October 18, the PT coalition asked the TSE to order the removal of the video, as well as a post by the Latino singer with a drawing of girls in a bathroom with boys. “When your little girl has to go to the same bathroom as boys and men, then you teach her how to do the ‘L’”, said the phrase pasted to the image.

Lula’s lawyers in the campaign pointed out “fake news” and, to this end, cited texts from checking agencies according to which the unisex bathroom was not in Lula’s government program, nor had it been proposed by him. After Bolsonaro’s live broadcast, Lula started saying that it was “absurd” to say that he would implement a unisex bathroom if elected.

“These guys have no respect. I am the father of five children, I have eight grandchildren, four of whom are girls, and I have a great-granddaughter. These guys think they can lie anyway? It’s not possible for people to have the gall to tell a lie like that inside a church,” he told flow podcaston October 18, right after Bolsonaro’s live broadcast.

The following day, October 19, during a meeting with evangelicals in São Paulo, he repeated that he has a family. “The story of a unisex bathroom could only have come out of Satan’s head,” he said, after saying that he was offended when people questioned his “respect for the family”. “I don’t consider a pastor to lie, pastor.”

On October 20th, in a preliminary injunction, Moraes repeated, in his decision, a long essay on freedom of expression, and that it did not shelter “hate speech”, “aggression”, and the “propagation of lying speeches, aggressive, hateful and prejudiced!”

Afterwards, he wrote that Bolsonaro’s statement “departs from reality, through untruths, by stating that candidate Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, as well as the Workers’ Party, would be in favor of implementing unisex bathrooms in schools, as well as the abortion and the liberalization of drugs”.

“This is the dissemination of untrue information tending to misinform the population about topics that are sensitive to the population, which require broad discussion, and on which it intends to win over the electorate opposed to such controversial matters, to the evident detriment of its opponent, including the check carried out demonstrating the falsity of the information.”

With this justification, he ordered YouTube to remove Bolsonaro’s video and Twitter to delete Latino’s post, within 24 hours, and prohibited the two from promoting new demonstrations about the unisex bathroom, under penalty of a fine of R$100,000 per day.

Bolsonaro appealed, claiming that the video was protected by freedom of expression and that “the party to which the opposing candidate is affiliated publicly supports the implementation of multi-gender public spaces, as well as abortion.” Moraes did not accept the arguments and, on January 13 of this year, fined Bolsonaro R$30,000 and Latino R$5,000.

In June this year, the case was brought to the plenary and all ministers agreed to punish Bolsonaro and Latino – Raul Araújo and Kassio Nunes Marques only differed on the amount, proposing that the former president pay only R$5,000, but they were defeated . Cármen Lúcia, Benedito Gonçalves, Floriano de Azevedo Marques and André Ramos Tavares followed Moraes.