A trans-identified male has been arrested in São Paulo, Brazil, after stabbing his former friend to death while she was cradling one of her young children in her arms. Since the horrific attack, Brazil’s Ministry of Women has issued a statement warning people about engaging in criminal “online transphobia.”
The incident took place on January 17 at the victim’s residence in the municipality of Tremembé and was captured by home security camera footage.
In the footage, which has since been released by police, Ivia Stefania da Silva de Castro can be seen sitting just outside her front door, cradling one of her children in her arms and scrolling on her cellphone.
Ewerton Adalberto dos Santos, who also goes by the female name “Ewellyn,” then casually approaches and enters her residence. He appears to retrieve a knife from the kitchen, and then storms out the front door to stab de Castro, who is reportedly a mother of 10 children, in the neck.
After being attacked, de Castro drops the child and falls to the ground, screaming in pain. The woman attempted to defend herself but was unable to overpower her attacker. Another one of her young children then rushes out to see her body on the ground.
In the video footage, dos Santos can be heard boasting “I will now call the police and tell them it was me.” When authorities arrived, dos Santos admitted to the crime immediately.
While being escorted to the police station in handcuffs, dos Santos was seen smiling and laughing at cameras from local media. The case remains under investigation, but some Brazilian news outlets have reported that the suspected motive may be jealousy. According to those reports, de Castro had recently started a relationship with a man dos Santos was allegedly interested in. Reports also say dos Santos was previously known to police for making threats.
Many Brazilian media outlets have reported the murder as having been committed by a woman, frequently omitting any mention of the perpetrator’s trans identification.
The case has already ignited a debate in Brazil over its incredibly lenient gender self-identification laws as police have reportedly registered the crime as homicide rather than femicide.
Although femicide is legally defined in Brazil as a crime committed against a female by a male, it can only be applied in situations where the perpetrator “identifies” as a man. In incidents involving trans-identified males committing crimes against women, the legal definition of femicide does not usually apply.
Femicide charges have also been applied in cases where the victim is a trans-identified male, prompting backlash from Brazilian women’s rights activists who claim statistics are being skewed as a result.
In a widely publicized case from December 2025, the Public Prosecutor’s Office ruled that the killing of a trans-identified male named Alice Martins Alves constituted femicide, stating that the crime was committed “against a woman for reasons related to her condition as a female, involving contempt for and discrimination against women.”
One day after the news of de Castro’s murder broke, Brazil’s Ministry for Women, which has not issued any statement addressing the killing, published a statement asserting that “online transphobia is a crime” and warning that negative online comments may cause trans-identified males to experience “fear, anxiety, isolation, and psychological suffering.”
The post was criticized by the women’s group MATRIA, which addressed the issue in a public video statement.
“The same week in which a mother was brutally murdered, with one child in her lap and another watching, by a man who declares himself a woman, the priority of the Ministry of (Prostate) Women was to warn the unsubmissive women who were discussing the case that ‘online transphobia is a crime,'” MATRIA wrote in an Instagram caption.
“It is curious that our fear, anxiety, isolation and psychological suffering do not seem to matter when we talk about what we feel when we encounter men who declare themselves women in our intimate spaces, for example. They do not matter when we are attacked by these people right here, online, with terms and threats that no woman has ever uttered in relation to a trans person … It is shameful that this Ministry carries the word WOMAN in its name and it is shameful the role that Minister Márcia Lopes lends herself to. History will not forget, and the women voters will not either.”
Due to the 2019 Supreme Court ruling that grouped “transphobia” in with “racism” as a criminal offense, Brazil has some of the most extensive gender ideology-based identity protections in the world.
Several women are currently facing criminal investigations for “misgendering” trans-identified males, and one feminist advocate was even able to obtain refugee status in the European Union as a result of an ongoing criminal case in which she was facing up to 25 years in prison for referring to a trans-identified male as a “man.”
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