Isabella Cêpa and Erika Hilton (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 week ago by andros_rex@lemmy.world to c/transgender

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34392841

I’ve seen it claimed by TERFs online that a woman named Isabella Cêpa was facing 25 years in jail for misgendering Brazilian politician Erika Hilton online, and managed to get refugee status in an EU country.

I’ve been training to find details online about what happened, but all of the sources I can find are very dubious. This just seems like something that would make more headlines than Reduxx, which is a site run by a Neo Nazi.

Does anyone know about this story?

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[-] dandelion 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/brazilian-feminist-misgendering-charges-asylum-europe/

This charge stems from a 2019 ruling by Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court which interpreted homophobia and discrimination against LGBTQ+ individuals as a form of racism.

In 2023, the court further ruled that homophobic slurs are punishable by prison, equating them with racist hate speech. Sentences can range from two to five years.

and from https://www.reuters.com/article/world/brazils-top-court-rules-to-make-homophobia-a-crime-idUSKCN1SV008/

Six of 11 of Brazil's Supreme Court judges late Thursday agreed that acts of homophobia and transphobia should be treated under current anti-discrimination laws until the country's parliament passed legislation dealing with LGBT+ protection.

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230822-brazil-high-court-rules-homophobia-punishable-by-prison

The 9-1 ruling puts homophobic hate speech on the same legal level as racist hate speech, which was already punishable by prison in Brazil.

...

Hate speech is punishable by prison terms of two to five years in Brazil.

so, based on the various sources here, what is likely is that Cêpa said some transphobic stuff, hate speech like that is illegal in Brazil and it looks like they were going to arrest her for it, but she fled the country before she could.

I think they get the 25 year figure by taxing the max prison sentence for hate speech (5 years) and multiplying it by the number of counts she was charged with (5 counts of hate speech).

What you wonder is what precedent exists for prosecuting hate speech crimes like this - what are typical sentences, can they be stacked like that for multiple counts? How likely is 25 years for transphobic hate speech online? Are hate speech laws applied this way without other crimes, or are they usually extra counts brought against people who are facing charges of other hate crimes, like murder. These are technical legal questions I don't have answers to, it would be nice to know.

Either way, the right-wing sources are hyperbolic and intentionally misleading - describing the inclusion of transphobia under anti-discrimination laws as classifying "homophobia ... as a form of racism". They conflate homophobia with transphobia, and then present a strawman, that the anti-discrimination laws classify anti-LGBT+ hate crimes as "racist", which is clearly not how this is reported elsewhere.

I'll leave with this excerpt from the Reuters article:

Homophobia is common in Brazil, a deeply religious country where both the Catholic Church and the popular evangelical Christian movement are frequently critical of gay rights and violence against LGBT+ people is rife.

...

At least 320 LGBT+ people were killed in Brazil in 2018 and 126 murders have been reported so far this year, according to watchdog group Grupo Gay da Bahia.

Brazil is also the most dangerous country in the world to be transgender, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring project, with at least 167 people killed in the 12 months to Sept. 2018.

[-] andros_rex@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

I really wish I could find a non right wing source reporting on the specifics of the case. Almost everything about this specific situation seems to point to Reduxx, which is just not a good source.

My gut feeling is that there was something violent too. It’s pretty typical of TERFs claiming that they were attacked for something they said to hide the context. I wish I knew Portuguese to track down the specific post.

[-] dandelion 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes, I don't see anything but right-wing coverage of this, so I feel you on that.

Either way, that the police might pursue hate speech charges against Cêpa seems at least plausible, though it's not clear to me that prison time is common for hate speech in Brazil.

Either way, it won't matter once responsible journalism covers the facts in a reasonable manner, the anti-trans movement is finding this useful in the meantime, and plenty of people will accept right-wing sources as legitimate (esp. the ones most likely to be sympathetic to anti-trans views).

What I find somewhat amusing is that all the attention in this case proves how exceptional it is - Jordan Peterson became famous claiming he would go to prison for mispronouning students and other cases like this would be happening in Canada if they included gender identity as a protected characteristic in anti-discrimination laws, and yet as far as I know that is not how that law worked and there have been no cases of misgendering resulting in prison:

Does the bill legislate the use of certain language? And could someone go to jail for using the wrong pronoun?

In the Criminal Code, which does not reference pronouns, Cossman says misusing pronouns alone would not constitute a criminal act.

“The misuse of gender pronouns, without more, cannot rise to the level of a crime,” she says. “It cannot rise to the level of advocating genocide, inciting hatred, hate speech or hate crimes … (it) simply cannot meet the threshold.”

Another suspicious aspect of the right-wing coverage is that they don't detail what Cêpa is receiving 5 counts of hate speech for, The European Conservative just says this:

In a video post, Cêpa expressed her disappointment, saying she 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 filed a police complaint, triggering a criminal investigation. By mid-2022, Cêpa had been charged with five counts of “social racism.”

I am suspicious that this statement alone arises to the level of hate speech, let alone 5 separate counts of hate speech crimes as they are claiming. Something doesn't add up here, there are discrepancies in both severity and number, so it would be nice to have a more full picture of what Cêpa said and what she is being charged with.

EDIT: sometimes browsers will auto-translate pages for you, btw - in case you want to pursue it further, though I understand if that's more work than it's worth (and who knows if Portuguese-language coverage is any more balanced, I would expect mostly right-wing coverage still).

this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2025

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