In São Paulo, Brazil, a father and son have built an unusual kind of family story — one that started with a four-year-old’s quiet sense that something about himself didn’t match how the world saw him, and ended, years later, with his mother walking the same path beside him.
Raphael, 38, and his son Gustavo, 10, were both assigned female at birth. Today, they both identify as male — and they’ve spent the last couple of years sharing that journey with nearly 25,000 followers on Instagram.
A Son Leads the Way
Gustavo was the first to begin his transition, starting at age 4. For years, his mother — known by a different name then — supported him through it without making a similar change herself.
That changed more recently, when Raphael began identifying as male too. In an interview with the Brazilian outlet G1, he was asked whether his son’s transition had influenced his own decision.
“It didn’t have any influence, but he gave me strength and courage to face it,” Raphael said.
For Gustavo, the shift in how he related to his parent didn’t come with much friction. “It wasn’t difficult to call my mother dad,” he said.
Care Through the Public System
Both father and son have accessed care through Brazil’s public health system, SUS. Raphael has been treated at Campo Limpo Municipal Hospital. Gustavo, as a minor, has been seen through the Transdisciplinary Outpatient Clinic for Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation, part of the Institute of Psychiatry and the Pediatric Endocrinology Unit at Hospital das Clínicas — one of Brazil’s largest teaching hospitals.
That kind of public, multidisciplinary clinic has existed in Brazil for years, serving transgender children, adolescents, and adults under guidelines set by the country’s Federal Council of Medicine. The framework has also been the subject of ongoing debate in Brazil, where regulators have more recently moved to tighten rules around gender-related care for minors — part of a broader international conversation playing out in the U.S., U.K., and elsewhere over how young people experiencing gender dysphoria should be supported.
Pushing Back on Old Names
One thing both Raphael and Gustavo have been vocal about is how others refer to them. Like many transgender people, they’ve asked friends, family, and strangers online to use their current names — not the ones they were given at birth, often called “dead names.”
It’s a small request, but one they’ve returned to more than once in their posts, describing it as a basic form of respect that doesn’t always come easily.
A Story Still Being Written
For now, Raphael and Gustavo continue to post updates from their life together — sometimes about appointments and milestones, sometimes just about being a father and son figuring things out, in front of an audience that’s grown to include thousands of strangers.
“It wasn’t difficult to call my mother dad,” Gustavo said. For this family, that simple sentence carries the weight of everything that came before it — and everything still ahead.