Arthur: My "dolls" saved my life.

"Luckily, I got dolls."

"I saw this doll as a different 'me' in the world, accompanying me through a 15-year struggle with my gender. I dressed the male doll as a woman and kept changing "her" look because no one would attack the gender relationship of the doll or think that a male puppet could not become a woman; they would marvel at how beautiful and sophisticated my doll was. This has been a long-standing source of spiritual comfort for me. I have always believed that the dolls determined me, not me, that chose the dolls. Now I am 25 years old, and I still love dolls and have become a professional doll make-up artist."

"When I was in middle school, I became more aware of my gender and became more confident that I liked boys - but this awareness did not mean that I was gay, but that I existed as a person who wanted men. And as I was a guy at the time, I couldn't have been upfront about my sexuality, let alone confess to liking guys. Because I knew that they would probably bully me for three whole years, and more likely by my own family and teachers, and there was no way I could accept that.

But my sexuality eventually came out. The reason was that I liked a guy at the time, and I used to hang out with him. He accidentally saw my diary (which recorded my daily moods) one day). What kid can keep a secret? So he secretly told someone about it, and my story spread throughout the class. This was the official start of my bullying in junior school."

"My junior high school teachers were very prejudiced against me because my best friend told them that I liked boys after a fight, so they often treated me differently and placed me in a seat that avoided the boys in the class. I was afraid to tell anyone that I liked boys, and I had to keep up a boy's appearance. At the same time, I was suffering from severe gender dysphoria, and I didn't know if I was supposed to be a girl, a gay, or something else. A soul in the wrong body is an excruciating thing."

"I didn't go to high school. I particularly hated school life at the time, so I dropped out at the end of junior high school and went to Xi'an. That would have been the most turbulent time of my life. I met many people my age who weren't doing their jobs, and every day I would go to a bar and get drunk and go home and sleep all day."

"How can I put it? Those two or three years was a very blank period of my life, but a period full of colour. Blank because it was as if I had lost the meaning of my life during that time, I didn't set any goals for myself in life, and I was wasting my time doing meaningless things day after day. Technically, I always wanted to go and live in an environment where no one knew me or in a big city and start afresh after experiencing chronic school bullying. That time was colourful again, as I gradually started to be my authentic self. I started wearing make-up and met many people like me, every one of them was confident and didn't care about the comments or judgements of others. But I was still afraid to wear women's clothes because people around me had a negative attitude towards guys wearing make-up, let alone guys wearing women's clothes."

(Excerpts from interviews)

30/10/2022

Pictures: Arthur

Edited by William Liu