Opposition Senator De Souza: My Twitter account was hacked

Temporary Opposition senator Taylor Jowelle De Souza says the tweets in which she apparently begged foreign dignitaries to congratulate her on being the first transgender person in this country's Parliament are fake, and the profile was hacked.

Speaking with Newsday on Tuesday, De Souza said she never posted those tweets, and when she is done with the Senate she would address it fully.

"That account is a hacked account. I haven’t used that account many years ago since we used it for gold. The picture on that account is not a picture that I put there. Anybody reading those tweets will see it’s impossible for me to put those tweets up because some say that I am elected, some say that I am ‘Mr,’ all different things."

In a series of tweets tagging the accounts of television host Ellen De Generes, former US first lady Michelle Obama, President Joe Biden and one supposedly belonging to former US president Donald Trump, the account called on them to send congratulations to her on becoming the first transgender woman in Trinidad and Tobago’s Parliament. The tweets came after De Souza's debut in the Senate last week Tuesday.

Some of the tweets contain grammatical errors and poor sentence construction.

They have received negative responses from some readers, who labelled them a desperate attempt to get attention.

But De Souza said, “Any person with one ounce of brain will notice that is not at all something that I will write. I am very stressed about it, very upset about it.

"But I will not let it take me down to another level. I will leave it as is for now and address it at another time.”

De Souza said she did not report the matter to the police and was not going to, since she felt she did not get justice after reporting a Facebook page that supposedly spread misinformation about her.

“I just want to get through this (temporary appointment) and then I will answer all these things that have been said about me. It is a terrible thing to know that I am doing something that I think is right and I have never interfered with anyone and here I am. Instead of people seeing the little good that this is doing, it is turning out to be a whole pack of people who jealous about it.

“Jealousy is a big part of this whole entire thing. People who I thought that I knew as friends and that have worked together, I see they and all have all been saying these nasty things.

“For someone to go and hack that account, I am very hurt by it.

"What can I do at this point? It just goes to show you that whenever you try to do good, people always find some way to turn it into something so bad.”