More Than One Truth
The Story of Bramma Bremmer Belo Horizonte, Brazil

The moment Bramma Bremmer with HIV, time seemed to split open. It was December 2020 a quiet, isolating month at the end of a brutal year and she wasn’t yet out as a trans woman. But something inside her shifted irreversibly.

“It was as if life and death were sitting on either side of me,” she remembers. “And I had to decide who I was going to be, if I was going to live at all. That’s when I chose me.”

Until then, Bramma had lived suspended knowing the truth of who she was, but not yet daring to step fully into it. The diagnosis was not the ending she feared. It was the beginning she needed. “Maybe if I hadn’t tested positive, I would’ve kept postponing everything. But when you’re faced with something so final, you suddenly understand how precious it is to live in your truth.”

Less than a year later, she began her transition.

When she told her grandmother the woman who raised her, who has always been her home she braced herself for heartbreak. “I was crying,” Bramma recalls. “I told her I had HIV. And she just looked at me and said, ‘So you take your medicine. You’ll live a normal life.’”

In that moment, something ancient lifted. “It was like healing across lifetimes,” she says softly. “Like I’d been carrying this truth for generations, and now I was finally seen. Fully. With love.”

Since then, Bramma has poured pieces of her story into her art. In the film Tudo Que Você Podia Ser (All That You Could Be), she plays a version of herself. The lines between documentary and fiction blur her real friends appear as themselves, her real therapist plays her therapist, and in one scene, Bramma tells her friends she’s undetectable. “They already knew,” she says, smiling. “But we filmed that scene anyway. Because someone watching might not know. It needed to be said.”

Though HIV is not the center of her identity, it has shaped her in quiet, profound ways. “I take my meds every morning my antiretrovirals, my hormone blockers. They’re part of my routine. But they don’t define me. Being trans is something the world sees. HIV is invisible unless I speak it out loud.”

And yet, in Brazil’s trans community, misinformation persists especially the myth that HIV treatment can interfere with hormone therapy. Bramma has heard it more than once. “But it’s simply not true. I’ve never had any issue. I’m monitored by an infectologist, a gynecologist, and an endocrinologist. None of them have ever said the treatments clash.”

Still, she understands the fear. “Being trans is already such a fight. When HIV enters the picture, for many girls, it feels like too much. Too risky. Too exposed. So they go quiet. They disappear from the conversation.”

In her city of Belo Horizonte, Bramma knows of only one other trans woman living with HIV who speaks publicly: Cristal Lopes. “I’m sure there are many more. But people stay silent. And I get it. It’s about survival.”

Even though she doesn’t see herself as a traditional activist, Bramma’s voice in her art, in conversation, in quiet moments of truth-telling holds power. She wants trans women to know that being themselves does not mean sacrificing their health. “You don’t have to choose,” she says. “You can transition. You can take your meds. You can be whole.”

Her HIV diagnosis didn’t take her power. It illuminated it.

“I’m not only this,” she says. “But this is part of me. And I speak it because I can.”