About the platform
VagasTrans is Brazil's national affirmative employment platform for trans people, conceived by Dr. Magno Kleiber Maia and maintained by Instituto Pathos.
Platform conceived by Dr. Magno Kleiber Maia, labour judge and coordinator of the Subcommittee for Gender, Race and Diversity Equity of the Regional Labour Court of the 21st Region (TRT-21), and maintained by Instituto Pathos
On either side there is everything it takes. In between, a gap no one crosses alone.
Qualified trans people, available for work and shut out of the formal labor market by barriers that have nothing to do with competence.
Companies, public institutions and the justice system with open positions and a stated commitment to diversity.
What was missing was not willingness. It was a safe bridge — qualified and institutionally backed.
The platform today
Trans women, trans men, travestis (a Latin American trans-feminine identity) and trans-identified non-binary people — looking for a first job, changing careers or returning to the formal labor market.
The scope is deliberate. Universal policies often fail to reach groups facing specific barriers: focusing is what makes it possible to design the right instruments — social name, a welcoming process, follow-up — and to measure real impact instead of assumed impact.
The platform also runs an internal prioritization for those in greater precarity, with explicit attention to Black trans women and Black travestis. It guides referral and care, never an exposed classification — the criteria are public.
Whose idea it was
Magno Kleiber Maia
A labour judge, and the person whose proposal gave rise to VagasTrans.
Born in Catolé do Rocha, in the state of Paraíba, he holds a law degree from UERN and a specialisation in Labour Law and Labour Procedure from UnP. He joined the Labour Courts of Rio Grande do Norte in 2002, served twelve years as a substitute judge in the Greater Natal area and, since 2014, has presided over the 2nd Labour Court of Mossoró.
He coordinates the Subcommittee for Gender, Race and Diversity Equity of the Regional Labour Court of the 21st Region (TRT-21) and the Judicial Centre for Conflict Resolution and Citizenship (Cejusc) of Mossoró, where he also trains mediators.
In August 2026 the Municipal Chamber of Mossoró awarded him the Desembargador José Rêgo Júnior Medal of Merit of Justice, for his career and for services rendered to the courts and to the city.
Under his coordination, the Subcommittee submitted to the Superior Council of Labour Justice a proposal that the electronic case system ask, at filing, whether a person wishes to be addressed by their social name. It is the same idea that holds up this platform, from the first field of the sign-up form to the last automated email: the person who arrives decides what they are called.
VagasTrans is one more front in that work. The idea came from him, and it came with a stated purpose: to give the cause visibility, to create a safe environment for hiring and for professional development, and to bring companies into a conversation that cannot wait any longer. Equity is for everyone. For trans people, it begins with being able to work in safety.
Three moments, and the person in control of each one.
Social name at the top, pronouns with the option not to say, and consent in plain language — separate for each purpose. Declining the priority markers blocks nothing: not sign-up, not applying, not courses.
Résumé and protected data live on separate screens on purpose, and every access to the protected ones is recorded in a trail that cannot be erased.
No institution publishes before being approved by a person, and no opening goes live without being read. Editing an already published opening sends it back to the queue — otherwise it would be enough to get an innocuous text approved and swap the content afterwards.
Matching looks at skills, field of work, region and experience. Gender identity, race and vulnerability are not part of the calculation — and a test reads the service's own code to make sure they stay out.
Every course in the catalog is free, and progress is declared by the person herself: the training institution follows along, it does not edit. Following someone's training is not surveilling them.
On the other side, the hiring funnel only moves forward, every stage change is communicated, and the person can withdraw an application at any time, without having to justify it.
These are not promises of conduct. They are rules enforced in the code, with automated tests that fail if anyone breaks them.
Search accepts field of work, skills, region, experience and availability. Any other criterion is refused out loud, with an error — it is not quietly left out of the screen: it does not exist.
The social name is the display identifier across the whole platform, including automated e-mails. The legal name is optional, stored encrypted, and never appears in a search, a report or an API response.
Priority status never becomes a badge, a tag or a filter — not for institutions, and not for the person herself. Not even the score behind it is shown to her: being handed a grade for your own precarity is stigma, not transparency.
At no point — not at sign-up, not when applying. And no institution can ask for it through the platform.
Indicators always come out aggregated, and cells that are too small are suppressed: with a base of three people, a percentage describes the trajectory of individuals, not a statistic.
There is no tracking script, no CDN font, no embedded map and no social media button. Everything this page loads comes from this server.
The platform was conceived by Dr. Magno Kleiber Maia — the proposal to connect trans people to affirmative job openings nationwide came from him, and gave rise to the project.
Maintains the platform: it answers for the project's continuity, for sustaining day-to-day operations and for the relationship with participating organisations. The platform is not an official court system.
Builds, hosts and maintains the platform, and answers technically for it: architecture, implementation, security and evolution.
The prioritization criteria are reviewed periodically, with the participation of trans people, and every revision is versioned — an index calculated last year is still explainable today.
The platform puts into practice commitments from the Belém Charter, signed at the COP30 seminar on Labor Justice, climate change and the Amazon.
Create your profile with your social name, choose who can see what, and apply to the affirmative openings that are live.
Create my profile See the free coursesSign the Institutional Commitment Agreement, publish affirmative openings and follow your own diversity indicators. Joining goes through human review.
Register my institution Read the agreement first
