On a Friday night at 11 p.m. in June 2022, 29-year-old Isabella Cêpa got a DM on Instagram from a journalist with Folha de S. Paulo, one of Brazil’s top newspapers. The journalist asked Cêpa for a response to the news that she was charged with five counts of “racism” for “misgendering” a transvestite politician and could face up to 10 to 25 years in prison. The journalist hadn’t expected her to see the message; the bombshell story was published the following day. It was the first time Cêpa had heard about the charges.
Three years later, Isabella Cêpa was granted formal refugee status on the grounds of political persecution by an unnamed European country. She is the first Brazilian since the end of the country’s military dictatorship to receive refugee status for being targeted by the state, and the first woman in the world to become an official refugee for her opposition to transgender ideology. She spoke to europeanconservative.com from her current country of residence, which cannot be named for security purposes.
“I’m just a marketing person, a graphic designer,” Cêpa told me. “But I had my Instagram page where I talked about domestic and sexual violence.” Cêpa herself is a survivor of both. “Those were always the main topics, until it got to the point where we couldn’t talk about women’s issues anymore, because before that, we had to come to an agreement on what a woman is.” Many critics of transgender ideology began to be very careful about which words they used, and how. Cêpa refused to do so.
In 2019, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled that discrimination against the “LGBTQ Community” was a form of “racism” under the country’s anti-racial discrimination laws, thus constituting “transphobia” as an offence under Brazil’s Penal Code. In 2020, trans-identifying Brazilian politician Erika Hilton successfully ran for a municipal position in São Paulo in 2020, and his landslide victory was celebrated by the international press as a “symbolic triumph” for the transgender movement.
Cêpa saw the headlines and shared a video with her followers noting her disappointment that the most “voted for woman” was a man. Hilton filed a report with the police, and Cêpa was interrogated by officers in January 2022. When Folha de S. Paulo broke the news that she was facing five charges, the case details were still sealed, and she did not have access to them. “For two years, I was waiting for someone to inform me about the lawsuit. I knew about the [one count], but there were five counts. So what were the other four?”
She found out at the Salvador Bahia Airport two years later. In July 2024, she was planning to travel to Spain to visit a friend. At the immigration counter, a federal agent told her that her passport had been flagged and asked if she was aware of any lawsuits or charges against her. Cêpa told him that she knew there were charges because of press articles two years previously, but that “I had no access to the files, and I have no idea what it is regarding.” The agent pulled up her case.
“He started reading the case files on the computer and he was like, this makes no sense,” she told me. “He had to take me to the restricted area of the airport, and I went into a room with eight federal officers. They all read the files and concluded that this was political persecution because there was no legal basis for the case. The agent called the cabin crew and told them: Do not close the doors of this airplane until this passenger is inside the airplane. Then, he escorted me to the plane. As he walked me there, he said: If you have the opportunity, just don’t come back. It’s not safe for you to be here.”
“The agents were all leftists—it was very clear in our conversation—but they know how the law works, so they just identified that it was too much, that it made no sense,” Cêpa said. “That was their recommendation: If we see you again, it’s going to be to arrest you when you come back, so don’t come back.” She was given a copy of her case files, and she began to read them on the plane. That was when she understood the full gravity of the charges she faced in Brazil.
“I started reading, and I understood that the other four charges were retweets of posts that I wasn’t even the author of—reposting things that were not offensive at all,” she told me. “It was just women saying: Hey, this is our last day to vote if we believe trans women shouldn’t go to female prisons. The division in prisons by sex is a constitutional right, and this is being violated, so it’s a very fair discussion, and I was just reposting this information. That’s how they got five charges.”
I was targeted because I was a permanent voice in radical feminism in Brazil, and very respected for my fight in sharing information about domestic and sexual violence. That’s why I was targeted. Many people said the same thing I said, but because I was respected as a feminist, I had to be silenced. I was a problem. Their goal was to get a sentence longer than four years because in Brazil, if you get less than four years, you don’t go to prison. They wanted jail. That’s why they dug in my Twitter to find anything I had said at any point in my life. So I was in the airplane with those papers, reading and thinking: What’s that?
When she arrived in Spain, Cêpa was unsure of what to do—but the reaction of the federal agents at the airport to her charges convinced her that she merely had to wait until the charges were dropped, and then she could return to Brazil. She spent a year in Morocco, and some time in Portugal, waiting for good news. It didn’t come. Instead, things got worse. As she traveled on tourist visas, her case was moved from São Paulo to the federal level. Allies back home, such as the women’s rights group MATRIA Brazil, exhausted every avenue on her behalf, including a face-to-face meeting with then-Minister for Women Cida Gonçalves, who wasn’t interested in helping. Other official channels were also dead ends.
