Laerte Coutinho, known mainly as simply Laerte, is a Brazilian cartoonist, comic strip artist and screenwriter. Assigned male at birth, she came out in 2009 as a crossdresser and later as a transgender woman. Laerte has collaborated with several publications such as Balão, O Pasquim, and Chiclete com Banana magazines and draws regularly for Folha de S. Paulo newspaper. She has created several comic strip characters, such as Piratas do Tietê (The Pirates of Tietê River). Since the mid 2000s, Laerte's strips became more philosophical and less humour-focused, abandoning fixed characters.