My name is Pisci, I’m 36 years old, and I come from São Paulo, Brazil.
I am a social anthropologist, a researcher in HIV and public health, and a travesti, a proud trans identity born of resilience, living with HIV for over thirteen years.
When I was first diagnosed, I was already on the edge of death.
My body had wasted away. I was bleeding. I was collapsing.
The diagnosis came too late, but somehow, I survived.
When my body began to heal, I realised that survival was only the first step.
True healing demanded more: to confront stigma, shame, and silence and to reclaim the self that fear had tried to erase.
For a long time, I carried self-stigma, a shame that was never truly mine.
In time, I understood: stigma is not born within us; it is cultural, institutional, and structural.
It is fuelled by racism, transphobia, and fear.
One form of violence feeds another. Once I saw that clearly, I began to turn pain into knowledge.
After years of loneliness and illness, I found others like me, people living with HIV, who refused to disappear.
That’s when I began to bloom again. I founded “Loca de Efavirenz,” a collective inspired by the medication that kept me alive for years, a powerful antiretroviral with harsh side effects, yet also a symbol of endurance.
Through it, I transformed suffering into art, resistance, and the courage to live, to speak, and to be seen.
Today, I work at the Emílio Ribas Institute of Infectious Diseases, the largest in Latin America.
There, I helped design a specialised care programme for transgender and travesti people living with HIV, a community often judged not for one identity, but for many: gender, race, class, and HIV stigma.
In Brazil, travesti is more than a gender identity it is a political act, a declaration of existence forged in exclusion, survival, and love.
To call myself travesti is to transform what once was pain into power.
I have spoken publicly about my HIV status, even on national television, to more than 150 million viewers.
I didn’t speak as a patient, but as a specialist. I took that risk because silence protects stigma, not people.
It was my ethical duty to tell the truth. Not everyone understood. Some family members turned away.
But my mother stayed, and her love saved me. Later, I built a chosen family of people who loved me without condition and helped me rebuild life from what once felt like ashes.
With them, I discovered that new life can grow even in places the world calls barren.
Today, I research, teach, and collaborate internationally on HIV cure projects not only in the biomedical realm, but also in the cultural and emotional realms.
Healing is not just about removing a virus from the body.
It’s about removing shame, restoring dignity, and reclaiming joy.
I am alive.
I am blooming.
And I am living proof that something beautiful can grow even from pain.