"Marriage to Jesus Christ"

moralities, religion, and gender politics in the "Catty Lares" case

Abstract

In the last years, the “detransition” of transgender and transvestite individuals became a phenomenon that has drawn attention from a broader audience in Brazil. In the country, social media is an arena where these processes circulate and reveal reactions from various social actors, addressing moral, religious, and political grammars concerning gender conceptions. We will approach this issue through the case of the public detransition, widely covered by the media, of the digital influencer Manuel, formerly known on social media as Catty Lares, who in April 2023 announced that he had “married Jesus.” We aim to map the narratives unfolding on social media from this event and the ways in which these constitute moral, religious, and political discourses that can reinforce or challenge notions of gender. Our goal is to explore, through this controversy, the relationships between “detransition,” religion, cisgenderism, and homotransphobia.