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This article analyses linguistic guerrilla wars being waged over the issue of gender in contemporary Brazil. It focuses on two phenomena: on the one hand, Dilma Rousseff’s use of the title presidenta, a strategy that feminizes a word and a political office that have historically been masculine; and on the other hand, the use of the letter x as a neutral gender ending, a strategy that breaks with the cisheteropatriarchal, binary grammatical system of the Portuguese language and that has become visible in the public space over recent years. In the case of Brazil, these phenomena allow us to see how the ‘ x da questaõ’ or ‘the [cru]x of the matter’, is no more than the construction of moral panic over the political potency of the concept of gender.