I support the inclusion and respect of all families in Brazi

I'm lesbian, I'm married, I'm a mother. But the erasure of my motherhood has happened ever since my children started to grow in my wife's womb and people began asking me if I would "play the role of the father."

One of the most painful moments happened when I found out the tax authorities (the Brazilian IRS, so to say) didn't consider me a mother to my own children. I remember I cried silently for 20 minutes.

After that day, I decided to speak more about these difficulties and discovered that my family's case is definitely not the only one. Homo-affectionate couples, like my wife and me, and trans-affectionate couples face many obstacles and even humiliations, just to obtain basic documents for their children – and sometimes we still can't actually do it.

The reason? Most public registries and forms to request documents have the field "father" and the field "mother". I'm not a father and neither is my wife. We're two mothers. Why, then, should one of us show up as "father" in our children's documents?

And, to make matters worse, this difficulty – or impossibility, in some cases – of proper registration prevents so many children and their families from accessing fundamental rights for any individual. It's the kind of inconsistency that causes problems, for example, in hospitals, schools, and the workplace.

This violates many of our human rights – and those of our children – simply because we are LGBT+ parents. The Brazilian State needs to respect and include all types of family structures in its forms and laws.

That's why we, together with the organizations ABGLT and Uirapuru Consultancy, and with legal support from the Fundamental Rights Clinic of the Law School at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), filed a legal action to change this.

Our request to the Brazilian Supreme Court could not be simpler: we want the replacement of the terms "Father" and "Mother" with "Affiliation 1" and "Affiliation 2" – or equivalent expressions that are not linked to specific genders (we don't have a gender-neutral word like "parent" in Portuguese, which is our language).

While so many rights are still denied to us, my family and I insist on being happy, on smiling, on loving each other, and having the conviction that the future will be more colorful and welcoming. Will you join us? Sign my petition, which I created representing so many families like ours.