In her teen years, Amanda Guimarães developed techniques to skip school without her mother knowing about it. She used to do things like leave her bedroom window half opened and pretend she was going to school. Then she would hide in the neighborhood and come back to the house after her mom had already left for work.
She also used to take the bus to school and hop off a few blocks away from it. Then she would stay in a videogames rental store until it was time for her to come back home from school.
“I failed twice because of excessive absences. In high school, I felt like a prey among hunters. Their mouths were like guns. The jokes and the vicious name-calling were the munitions,” she told BCC Brazil.
The minute I walked into the classroom, they would start saying things like “Here comes the fag” or “Why can’t you walk like a man?” or even “Get a haircut, poodle!”
“I still have horrible nightmares. I dream that I’m back in high school and I wake up shaking from head to toe,” she says.
But those high school days in Morungava, a town close to Porto Alegre, with a population of over 6 thousand people, are over. Now she’s 27 and shares an apartment with a rabbit, a turtle and a guinea pig in Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China.
She has a part-time job as a waitress in a friend’s restaurant and in her spare time she is Mandy Candy, a very popular YouTube star, with more than 300 thousand followers. In her YouTube videos, she talks about things like which restroom she uses and how she told her Asian boyfriend she is a transsexual.
However, the fame didn't stop her from being attacked. After she posted a video where she talked about her transsexuality, in February 2015, she started to suffer bullying again.
There were many comments from religious fanatics saying she was going to hell. Some other people threatened to beat her up.
“Sometimes I feel like a freak of nature and sometimes I feel like the characters from X-Men. But it doesn’t matter if you’re fat, black, Asian, gay or trans. If you were attacked online, you should report it. Cyberbullies need to be punished,” she says.
Versão do português para o inglês: Tradução & Informação
