In Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has proclaimed that he will finish the task of the military regime that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. In 2003, he told Maria do Rosário, a fellow member of congress, that he would never rape her because "you do not deserve it". Perhaps most telling of all, he once quipped that only a "moment of weakness" can explain why one of his five children "came out a woman". The formulation "came out a woman" is the real giveaway, as if an infant's sexual destiny as woman were fixed from the beginning and she has no right to any other ideas. His words resonate with potential sexual violence, not just because he clearly holds all women in such brazen contempt. Ensuring that women will be women and nothing else, pinning them down as women, can be seen as one of the core motives of rape, which is why all rapes, not only those targeted at lesbian women, should be defined as "corrective" (In Brazil, a woman is the victim of physical violence every 7.2 seconds.)

Trans experience, also the target of violence, belongs here, too, as it clearly binds the issue of sexuality to that of political struggle – freedom achieved and withheld. Despite being far more widely accepted than ever before, transgender people are still being killed for daring to present the world with the mostly unwelcome truth that sexual identity is not all it is cut out to be. Not everyone comfortably belongs on the side of the inaugurating sexual divide where they originally started, or to which they were first assigned.

Some cross from one side to the other, some see themselves as belonging on neither side, others on both (these options are by no means exhaustive). Sexuality creates havoc. Kicking it back into place – a doomed project – is one way in which an oppressive culture tries and fails to lay down the law. Bolsonaro has explicitly stated that removing "gender theory" from the university curriculum is a chief objective of his educational reforms.