Laerte Coutinho (born 10 June 1951), known mainly as simply Laerte, is a Brazilian cartoonist and screenwriter, known for creating comic strips such as Piratas do Tietê (Pirates of the Tietê River).
She was part of the Brazilian underground comics scene of the 1980s. She has done work for publications such as Balão, O Pasquim, and Chiclete com Banana magazines, and draws regularly for Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. Since the mid 2000s, her strips have become more "philosophical" and less humor-focused, relying less on recurring characters.
Assigned male at birth, she came out as a transgender woman when she was 57 years old. She became a founding member of the Associação Brasileira de Transgêner@s ("Brazilian Association of Transgender People").
She contributed to the Google Doodle for International Women's Day 2018 by creating a short comic about a man and a transgender woman falling in love (seen above).
