Last weekend, a normal “before and after” photo of a family on the beach caused a real stir on social media due to a small detail: the gender change of one of the components of the photograph. In the image, Gabriel appears alongside his sisters and mother as children. In the second, Gabriel appears, again alongside his family, however, now, 18 years later, he has already gone through the process of adapting to the gender with which he identifies. In the first image, he appears as a girl, but, over time, the boy understood himself as a trans man and underwent surgical procedures such as a mastectomy. In an interview with Catraca Livre, he said that he now feels like a “totally happy” person with the possibility of being shirtless on the beach. “I could really feel like Gabriel, without any judgmental looks, without strange looks and malicious whispers”, he highlighted. Regarding family acceptance, the young man said that “it took about three years for them to understand the real difference between gender identity and sexual orientation, but they tried. It also took them a while to adapt to my new name, but there was always respect,” he declared. Finally, Gabriel said he doesn't mind or stop being upset by transphobic comments, like those he has received in the publication that went viral on the web and has more than one hundred thousand shares.
