(LifeSiteNews) — A young woman was granted political asylum in Europe after fleeing her native Brazil, where she faced 25 years in prison for “misgendering” a trans-identifying male politician. As Reduxx noted, Isabella Cêpa “is the first person to be recognized as a victim of state persecution for her outspoken opposition to gender identity ideology.”
The criminal investigation began in 2022 after Cêpa correctly referred to trans-identifying Brazilian politician Erika Hilton as male on social media. Hilton successfully ran for a municipal political position in São Paulo in 2020, and his victory was hailed by the international press as being a “symbolic triumph” for the transgender movement. Hilton’s landslide victory also earned him the accolade of “most voted-for woman (sic) in Brazil.”
“At the time, I didn’t even know who this person was. I just saw a headline on an Instagram page celebrating that ‘the most voted woman in São Paulo is a transwoman,’” Cêpa told Reduxx in 2022. “Then, I shared a video with my followers saying I was disappointed to hear that the most voted-for woman in São Paulo – later found out that it was in the entire country – was a man.”
Hilton took revenge, reporting Cêpa, who was then 29 years old, to the police and filing a complaint. The police interrogated Cêpa in January 2022, and she found out in June after being contacted by a Brazilian reporter that she was being charged with five counts of “social racism” for her “transphobic” social media posts. In addition to her comments about Hilton, the public prosecutor had closely examined her social media accounts for other “transphobic comments” and added them to the charges.
As I noted in our July 24 report on a Brazilian janitor facing five years in prison for asking a trans-identifying man to leave a women’s bathroom, “social racism” became a crime in Brazil after a 2019 ruling by the Supreme Federal Court stipulating that discrimination against the “LGBTQ Community” was a form of “racism” under the country’s race-based protections, and thus constitutes a penal offense. Cêpa found out that she could face 25 years in jail not from the prosecutor but from a newspaper article.
As Reduxx reported, Cêpa was “stopped at the Salvador Bahia Airport while attempting to travel in Spain to visit a friend” in July 2024 after agents noted “an alert linked to her passport and pulled her aside for further inspection.” As a result, however, the authorities told her that “her situation could meet the criteria for political persecution.” They took her situation very seriously, informing her airline and stating that the plane could not take off until Cêpa boarded.
Cêpa, now 32, was treated as an endangered political dissident, with an officer personally escorting her onto the plane and informing her that she should not return to her home country of Brazil. As Reduxx noted, this began a “period of statelessness” for the young woman; in June 2025, she formally applied for refugee status in an unnamed European country with the help of the European Union Agency for Asylum and was successful, “making her the first Brazilian citizen to receive this designation for state persecution since 1985.” Reduxx did not divulge the country where she now resides in order to protect her privacy.
According to the women’s rights group MATRIA Brazil:
Cêpa is the first Brazilian since the end of our military dictatorship to be granted political asylum on the grounds of state persecution — and the first woman in the world to receive this status for being targeted over her dissent on trans ideology. This is a reality many women face across the globe. It is deeply troubling that in our own country, democracy, freedom of belief, and freedom of speech appear to no longer apply. Many women — not only Isabella — are being harassed and silenced simply for speaking the truth: that sex matters, and that men cannot become women by an act of will.
MATRIA Brazil noted that every political avenue within Brazil had first been exhausted, including a face-to-face meeting with then-Minister for Women Cida Gonçalves, who “showed no concern and took no action … No other official channel offered any support either. Cêpa was left with no choice but to resort to the last and most extreme measure: seeking political asylum abroad.” Trans-identifying men now trump women in Brazil.
For the past several years, progressive commentators such as Anne Applebaum have been sounding the alarm about populist figures and their disdain for democracy, including Brazil’s former leader, Jair Bolsonaro. Now, a young woman has been forced to flee her home country, the land of her friends, family, and culture, because of the growing global threat of LGBT totalitarianism. The silence surrounding this case and the extraordinary and dramatic events surrounding it are revealing to say the least. Cêpa is the first such refugee, but she will not be the last.
