EXCLUSIVE: The Inside Story of Europe’s First Official Gender-Critical Refugee

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.

“I spent six months in a city in Morocco with 5,000 inhabitants,” she told me. “I was the only foreigner, and it was complete isolation. I needed to just settle and have some stability in my life. I was getting super tired, and things were getting worse. I needed to be somewhere I could work, because I lost my career when I was cancelled. It’s been three years that I’m looking for a job, and I can’t manage to find a job. If you would Google my name, it would just say that I was a bigot who was going to spend 25 years in jail.”

Desperate, she turned to the European Union Agency for Asylum for help. They found her application difficult to believe. “The story is so ridiculous that they were like, no, this is not possible,” Cêpa said. “We had to translate more than a thousand pages of case files for them to understand the depth of the madness that was going on. I remember getting the paper granting refugee status—that’s when I realized: Okay, I’m safe.” 

“And then my second thought was: This has never happened before. It is the first case in the world. It was insane. I froze. I remember just being there like a rock.”

Cêpa had lived as a digital nomad before, but nothing had prepared her for living as a permanently exiled dissident. She cannot return to her home country to visit her friends and family; they cannot afford to come and visit her. Most of her things—books, boxing gloves, clothes—are still in Brazil, and as the seasons changed and she moved from country to country, she was forced to buy new clothes. She has now been away from Brazil for a year and a half with no means of supporting herself.

“It’s awful,” she said. “I miss everything. Sometimes I even enjoy going to Portugal so I can drink guarana and eat some tapioca. I miss being with my friends. The most difficult part of this is not being able to have any kind of social interaction, especially as a refugee. I cannot trust anyone, I cannot make friends. I avoid meeting people and telling them where I’m from. If I hear anyone speaking Portuguese, I run because I don’t know if I can trust these people with my location. It is a very lonely journey. I usually like being alone, but sometimes on weekends I would just like to have a barbeque with my friends.”

Cêpa had to turn in her Brazilian passport when she applied for refugee status and is now waiting to receive the Geneva passport. Until she does, she cannot leave the asylum country. When she does, she will be able to travel again—everywhere but home.

How did Brazil become so authoritarian that a young woman had to flee her country to escape prison for calling a man a man? That, Cêpa said, is because “Brazil was used as a lab. There’s fake news all over the media that says Brazil is the country that kills the most trans people. This data is completely fake, but it was used in the Supreme Court ruling that decided to equate ‘transphobia’ to racism.” The Supreme Court cannot change the law—that is parliament’s prerogative—but it can reinterpret the penal code. Brazil, being South America’s largest country and generally gay-friendly, was seen by LGBT groups as “a good land to plant this seed of trans ideology.”

Open Society, the Ford Foundation, and many organizations from around the world put a lot of money into media, and all sorts of NGOs that spread fake numbers about the trans population in Brazil. This was used by the Supreme Court to create the ruling, and now the ruling is used to coerce and silence women who dare to say the obvious. Most Westerners know nothing about South America besides stories about cartels and crimes. So if you publish fake numbers about South America, who’s going to prove they’re wrong?

In short, major philanthropic institutions poured money into LGBT activist outfits and media outlets and donated to politicians. Politicians decide which NGOs to fund; give the LGBT groups taxpayer money; and the groups produce reports and recommendations, which the politicians then use to advocate LGBT policies. It is a circular taxpayer-funded revolution on behalf of taxpayers who largely disagree with gender ideology—and certainly oppose the persecution of Isabella Cêpa and many others like her (a janitor is currently facing five years for asking a trans-identifying man to leave a women’s bathroom). 

“All of the women I retweeted are being prosecuted now,” Cêpa told me. 

They’re all being investigated. One of them is now in the same situation. She’s being charged with two cases of racism, which means she can still go to prison because she’s in Brazil. Nobody would publicly support us because it’s not clear in the law what is a crime and what is not. People are being prosecuted, and nobody is allowed to talk about it. I literally had to leave the country and get international protection to be able to. A judge from the state of São Paulo demanded that my Twitter be blocked for any Brazilian IP addresses, and the company itself told the judge that this is unconstitutional and a violation of my rights. And they did it anyway.

On September 2, Brazil’s Supreme Court decided to “archive” Cêpa’s case, meaning that it is closed—for now. It is, she noted, a “groundbreaking precedent” that signals a victory for freedom of speech. “This isn’t just about me,” she wrote on X. “It’s the first time in Brazil that a radical feminist voice was formally targeted through criminal prosecution and failed. What started as an attempt to silence a woman for speaking truth to power has now become a legal turning point … This ruling is a milestone in Brazilian history.”

But the case was not dismissed, meaning that the Court can still resurrect her charges at any time, and “it is still not clear if ‘transphobia’ is a crime or not because people are being prosecuted anyway,” Cêpa said. “It’s a big win, because they wanted me to be the first feminist to go to prison, and I ended up being the first feminist to have my case archived and being granted refugee status for this—the precise opposite of what they intended.” 

But she still cannot return home, because if she speaks out again, she could be rearrested—and this time, officials are unlikely to let her leave the country.

When I asked Cêpa how she was staying sane throughout this ordeal, she laughed. 

“I’m definitely not,” she replied. “I’m not sleeping. I have a psychiatrist appointment tomorrow. I’m changing my medication all the time. I go to the gym; going to the gym, that’s what keeps me sane, going to the gym and pretending I’m a normal person, pretending like I’m back in my actual life. But then, someone talks to me in the sauna, and I get scared and run back home. It’s complicated, but I’m trying. It’s countless how many times I had suicidal thoughts during this journey. I got very close to it, but I have some really good friends who helped me through it.”

Life as a refugee feels impossible. She needs to pay her bills, but it has been difficult to find a job. She has had to crowdfund donations to purchase badly needed new glasses, furniture, and pay for rent. Her friends have told her that they admire her strength, and that they cannot believe she has made it through this ordeal.

“It’s unbelievable to me, too,” Isabella Cêpa said. “I don’t even know how I got here alive. But let’s keep pushing and see what happens.”