"With what the slave trade and colonialism implied—the more often forced, but sometimes voluntary movement of people across the Atlantic—these transgressive gender performances became the target of the inquisition. The Church disseminated the message that individuals who did not conform to their idea of men and women could be a bad influence on Christian colonial society.

One of those targeted was Vitoria. Her story was popularized by the ground-breaking work of the Brazilian queer historian Luiz Mott. We know of Vitoria (originally a slave named Antonio, from Benin, West Africa) from the authoritative accounts of the Portuguese Inquisition in Lisbon, which had her arrested in 1556. She dressed as a woman, and worked in the riverbank of Lisbon, where she would beckon men, “like a woman enticing them to sin.”

“Under questioning by the Inquisitors,” according to James H. Sweet, a historian at the University of Wisconsin Madison, Vitoria “insisted that she was a woman and had the anatomy to prove it.” The inquisition was not convinced and she was eventually given a life sentence. Whereas the Portuguese could only see deviance and sodomy, “their feminine gestures, their same-sex behaviours were simply expressions of their broader spiritual roles, roles that went completely unrecognized by the Portuguese.”

– Mohammed Elnaiem, "The “Deviant” African Genders That Colonialism Condemned"
https://daily.jstor.org/the-deviant-african-genders-that-colonialism-condemned/