A lesbian needs your support

MATRIA is campaigning to help a lesbian woman, a worker, who, like many others, left home very young and endured many hardships throughout her life simply for being who she is. Today, this woman is 39 years old, cares for two elderly aunts, and owns no property to be “taken away,” as her aggressor wishes.

She was insulted by a trans-identified man on a page created for a lesbian audience and, after responding verbally, was threatened, harassed by him and his followers, and is now being criminally prosecuted by him.

IF A HOMOSEXUAL WOMAN CAN BE PROSECUTED FOR RESPONDING TO INSULTS INSIDE A SPACE MADE BY AND FOR LESBIANS, THEN ALL OF US ARE AT RISK.

This woman has been facing an unjust criminal case since 2020, at risk of imprisonment, simply because she responded to homophobic and misogynistic insults from a trans-identified man who invaded a space created exclusively for lesbians.

What happened?

In 2020, a man who claims to “feel like a woman” entered a page for lesbian women and hurled heavy insults and slurs—both homophobic and misogynistic—at the women participating in the conversations. None of them insulted him; however, after saying that the women in that group (all homosexuals) were “just like men” (an extremely homophobic insult), he was confronted with the reality that trans women are biological men.

After insulting all of those women with strong homophobia and misogyny (we cannot reproduce the terms here because they are evidence in a case under judicial secrecy), he tried to twist the narrative by editing the messages and deleting the parts where he himself had issued the homophobic insults.

“These edited images, without the parts where he was extremely aggressive and violent, were posted on his social media, with my photo and profile @ tagged.”

“I then received a flood of private messages with threats of physical and sexual violence from his followers. I had to shut down and deactivate my profile.”

“He set up the whole situation in order to later edit the images and do what he did. It was all planned. He even told me himself that he would take a lot of money from me.”

And, as if that weren’t enough, this person managed to initiate a criminal case with as “evidence” only those images he himself had edited, stripped of the full context of the conversations. This case has been ongoing for four years under judicial secrecy (which unfortunately prevents us from providing further details). Even though it was dismissed twice by a judge, it has been reopened and will now go to trial.

Because the case is under a gag order, we cannot reproduce the terms used by the trans-identified man to refer to lesbian women, nor the statements he deliberately edited and decontextualized to sell the false narrative that he was being insulted.

“I am bearing alone the costs of a long and expensive defense, which has already deeply affected my psychological health and financial stability.”

Why does this matter?

Lesbians have the right to free association.

Women have the right to privacy.

We have the right to name and protect our own spaces.

How you can help ✊

“I ask for financial support to cover the costs of my defense. Any contribution makes a difference in the face of this long, heavy, and unjust process.”

The persecution of one lesbian is persecution of us all.

We cannot allow this to advance in silence.