“We’re going to cure your illness,” replied her father. Hours later, Huang would begin to understand when a round but sturdy, 40-ish drill-instructor type wearing camouflage gear and with a buzz cut appeared to greet them.

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“What is this place?” she protested. “Who is that man?”

“He can cure you,” her sister replied. Then she and their father took hold of Huang’s arms and pulled her from the vehicle, dragging her past a set of iron gates towards the man she would soon come to know, and dread, as Old Zhang.

The previous month, Huang, who was born male, had come out as transgender in a handwritten letter to her family and run away from home. Caught by police, she was taken a few days later to the psychology department at Southwest Hospital, in Chongqing, where she and her father discussed gender reassignment surgery. A huge step. Her father “thought there were only two genders”, Huang says, so “if I wasn’t set on being a girl, I’d have to turn back to being a boy”.

After that, nothing further was said on the subject. Huang returned home before finding a job in Suzhou, about an hour away. And now here she was being hauled into a schoolhouse in Chongqing, more than 1,000km from home.

Huang remembers the first time she walked down that dark, narrow hallway in the Chongqing Lishi Information Engineering School, passing rooms where a few children came to the doorways, some greeting the family. She recalls feeling “they were without souls”.

She was left in a dormitory at the end of the hallway with eight other children, ranging in age from nine to 18, all wearing camouflage uniforms and with heads shaved. Pillows and blankets for bunk beds were stacked in a corner, and the windows of the small, damp bathroom were crossed with iron bars.

Huang’s family paid up and left without goodbyes. Minutes later, Old Zhang entered the room to talk with her. In the months to come, the “cure” for her sexuality, and for the deviant or delinquent habits of the other students, would be dispensed in the form of boot camp-style training and regular beatings.

According to public records, the school, a private institution, was established in 2007 for the education and training of young adults. A contract states that the school provides “psychological crisis intervention, military training, labour training, filial and gratitude education”.

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Across China, such institutes exist to “regulate” the behaviour of teenagers, be they gay or transgender, video-game addicts or simply disobedient or rebellious. Effectively, to re-educate them.

China may have decriminalised homosexuality in 1997, and removed it from a list of mental illnesses in 2001, but the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders continues to include gender identity disorder (GID), defining it as “people who dress or participate in activities of the opposite gender, who persistently reject their own biological features and social activities”, when such behaviour has “lasted for more than six months”.

The World Health Organization has removed GID from the list of mental illnesses in its 11th revision of the International Classification of Diseases, which officially comes into effect in 2022, but a GID diagnosis from a medical institute is still the only path to gender reassignment surgery in China.

Xiaomi, director of Beijing-based NGO China SOGIE Youth Network, com­prising LGBT groups in Chinese universities, says, “GID is outdated internationally; it’s a category of mental illness, meaning that being transgender is somewhat ‘abnormal’, providing a discriminatory aspect medically.”

Huang – as she wishes to be known for reasons of privacy – was born in Chongqing in the spring of 2001. She grew up with an older sister and brother, living with grandparents while their parents were away working factory jobs, like hundreds of thousands of other migrant workers across China.

When she reached school age, Huang’s parents took their three children to Jiangyin, where they had found stable work, so the family could be together. Having been picked on in Chongqing, Huang hoped Jiangyin would offer some respite, but once there, classmates teased the new boy who “acted like a girl”, she says. “I played house with other girls, pretending grass was vegetables and putting it in clay bowls …”

On one occasion, while walking with another boy, Huang held his hand and swung it back and forth, just as the girls in their class would do. The other children called them homosexuals, taunting them that they wanted to get married. When puberty arrived, Huang’s body began to change, and, she says, “the person in the mirror was like a monster”.

Having finished her first year in junior high, Huang traded school for a job fixing cars and moved out of her parents’ house. She began browsing online for people who shared her experience and found an article describing a group called yaoniang, or drug girls: boys who take medicine, mostly hormonal, to help their bodies develop feminine features. She followed suit and gradually her voice became higher and her chest grew. Her parents, busy with work, didn’t notice, but Huang could finally look at herself in the mirror.

And then came that fateful day in February 2018 when Huang decided to run away from home, leaving her family the letter in which she also revealed she had been taking hormonal drugs. “You would never accept my situation,” she wrote, “even if you did, you wouldn’t be able to accept how society views us.”

Huang’s parents reported her gone and all of Jiangyin started to search for “a missing 16-year-old boy”. On the seventh night, the police found Huang, having followed her taxi by CCTV to Suzhou.

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A few days later her father took her, dressed in her usual T-shirt and jeans, to the Chongqing hospital. During a lengthy evaluation, the doctor asked Huang whether she was comfortable with herself, whether she hated herself. She said no, and the doctor reached the conclusion she was not suffering from GID. Unsure what this diagnosis meant, that is when Huang had the talk with her father.

Old Zhang walked Huang through the ground rules. The students would eat together, were not to possess electronics, jewellery or make-up. “It will only be for a one-week trial,” she says he told her.

That night, Huang shared a bed with a boy, shivering under a thin blanket. She was woken the next morning at 5am. The students began the day by organising their rooms, and at 6am were ushered into a cafeteria for a breakfast of porridge, pickled vegetables and buns.

Eggs were served once a week, on Mondays. After breakfast, Huang’s roommate Liao Zihao showed her the uniforms. “Put it on,” Liao said. “If you don’t, we’ll get punished.”

Morning exercise included push-ups, long jump and a 5km run. In the afternoon, the students attended basic maths, Chinese and sometimes psychology classes. When Huang returned to her dorm on the first night, she asked the other children why they were sent to the school. The reasons were varied: playing too many video games, getting a tattoo, not coming home at night, getting into fights … “Why don’t you run away?” asked Huang. She was told no one had ever escaped.

A psychology teacher, who prefers to use the name Lesley, previously worked at the school’s Chengdu location and visited the Chongqing school for a week-long training course. “They recruit psychology teachers to provide the children counselling, but it’s a sham,” she says, adding that most parents, even if their children are diagnosed with bipolar disorder, prefer to play it down.

They feel that having their children diagnosed with such a disease would mean “losing face”, Lesley explains, and some “schools” claim they can treat it, banking on the parents’ fear and ignorance of the illness.

“The services they provide there aren’t real counselling services,” Lesley says. “Instead, they will ask the counsellors to take on some academic teaching as well. They don’t provide separate rooms for the teachers, or provide any therapy-related equipment. I would say this school is a showcase of many social problems in China.”

Founded in 2013, the school advertised its use of Confucian philosophy, classic Chinese literature and calligraphy to “transform” students who were addicted to the internet and gaming. Follow-up media reports found ill-treatment was common, and then began what often felt like a never-ending lawsuit between a number of former students and the school.

This July, according to public court records available on China Judgments Online, four teachers and school administrators were finally sentenced by a local court to prison terms ranging from 11 months to more than two years for illegally detaining students. But the damage has been done.

Some students told the media they suffered from depression or trauma, several would not talk about their experiences, and for many, their relationships with their parents, who had turned a blind eye to protect their own reputations, were beyond repair.

A few weeks after Huang arrived at the Chong­qing school, Old Zhang and the coaches woke the students at 3am, she says. A 14-year-old named Chen Hongbang had stolen a set of keys and tried to open the front gates to leave, but had made too much noise and woken the teachers.

“We haven’t had this kind of incident in a while,” Old Zhang told them. “Let’s give you something to remember. All activities will be cancelled, we’ll enter hell week.”

Huang remembers Chen being taken into a corner and two other students pressing him to the ground while Old Zhang beat him. “We heard screams, like a pig being slaughtered. Nobody dared move. Nobody thought of escaping again,” Huang says.

Now Huang understood there was to be no “trial period” and she became determined to achieve good grades and earn trust. Five months later, in August 2018, she placed second in a sports competition after completing 150 push-ups in three minutes.

Her performance earned her a star on her shoulder patch, an honour bestowed on only five students in the school. She began to enjoy privileges, such as ice cream. And when the coaches beat her, she took it without complaining. She says she “reminded myself that as long as I’m alive, there’s hope, and I must get out”.

One day that month, Old Zhang surprised Huang with the news that her parents had come to visit. The family went out for hotpot, where Huang tried to convince them she had changed and said that she could no longer bear to stay in the school. Her parents said they would pick her up after Lunar New Year. “Be a good person,” they told her, “work hard, transform.”

After dinner, the family stopped at a convenience store where Huang put a few boxes of chocolate on the counter, her heart thumping. She knew this was her chance. New Year was six agonising months away. While her parents fumbled for change, Huang manoeuvred around the shelves and made a run for it.

There were no street lamps outside and only the moon lit the way as she made her bid for freedom, running down hills and diving to the ground as cars passed. When a van pulled up and two school instructors stepped out, she ducked into an alleyway before leaping into a vegetable field, scraping her knee on a cucumber rack as she fell hard in the dirt.

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“The kid jumped,” she recalls one of the men shouting. “Fan out!”

Flashlights beamed overhead, but Huang conquered her fears and inched her way out of the field. Forcing her legs to work, she limped towards a nearby bridge “as if having a seizure”, egging her muscles on. “Move, move! Run, run!” About 20 minutes later, she reached the lights of an industrial estate, having shaken off her pursuers. “I had finally made it,” she says.

With the two yuan (30 US cents) in her pocket, Huang bought a bus ticket to Southwest Hospital, where she had visited the psychologist with her father, and where she was familiar with the layout. For the next few days, she slept in the hallways, drank from bathroom taps and rooted through rubbish for food.

One cleaning lady wanted to call the police, but when Huang begged her not to, the woman slipped her 20 yuan and told her to get some help. Huang tried looking for jobs at nearby shops and restaurants, but all asked for ID. She thought about contacting the police, but feared Old Zhang might have connections with them.

A couple of days later, she sneaked into the hospital’s basement canteen after it had closed for the night and opened the steam oven, stuffing herself with meat buns, pork chops and eggs. The next night she went to a supermarket looking for a mobile phone. There she was spotted by an employee who called the local Tianxingqiao police station. The police helped Huang to contact her father, who told her to go back to school, take a shower, get some food, and that he would come for her in a couple of days.

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Back at the school, things had changed since her escape. Now when parents visited their children, they were not allowed outside the campus, and after a few days she realised her parents had duped her again.

Her roommate, Liao, told her he had known that this would happen.

“Your family is not coming,” he said, “you might as well be obedient.” Liao walked over to the window and began to cry. “I should have been out by now, but Old Zhang kept telling my aunt to send more money and keep me here longer.”

Huang longed for a second chance to escape and then, a few months later, her family suddenly showed up, finally relenting, and she spent Lunar New Year 2019 at home. They discussed her going to school in Chongqing and after the holiday they packed the car. But she soon noticed they were driving not to Chongqing but towards Henan province. Her parents had deceived her again but this time they drove to a base near the Shaolin Temple, known for its martial arts and hard physical training.

Almost immediately, Huang began to plan her escape. A few days later, she scaled the walls with the help of a classmate and ran. She covered hundreds of kilometres, sleeping under bridges and eating vegetables from fields along the way – onions, cabbages, bak choi. When she could run no further, she hitchhiked about 500km to Xuzhou, in northwest Jiangsu province.

There she was discovered by an old man at a construction site. As she recounted her ordeal to the man, he looked flabbergasted. “My child, how are you still holding up? You can’t even stand firmly on your feet, your face is nothing but bones.” He contacted her father, who came the next morning.

“I will not force you any more,” Huang’s father told her. “You can do whatever you want.”

Zhang Yunyi attended the Chongqing Lishi Information Engineering School in 2019, not long after Huang had escaped. When he was released that June, he attempted to report the school to the police but was told he would have to report the issue to a bureau local to the school. Zhang says he did not dare – he feared the police might sell him out to the teachers. “They have strong local connections,” he says.

Instead, he wrote to the Chongqing Municipal Education Commission. He has not heard back, he says. He even pretended to be a parent and called the school, recording a receptionist bragging about how obedient the students became after following the programme. He also made a series of videos about his experience at the school, but racked up only a few hundred views. On the internet, people expressed sympathy and disbelief, but few could offer help.

There are no official figures on how many such schools exist in China. In 2016, the state-run China National Radio estimated that there were at least 300 organisations advertised as “internet addiction detox centres”, with online adverts about “saving children with addictions, who rebel, who hate school, have premature love relationships and who run away from home”.

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Media reports and online posts about mistreatment in such centres usually have little effect.

This August, Zhang noticed the Chongqing school was recruiting students again in an online advertisement. “I felt sad,” he says, “because that means others are suffering again.”

After Shaolin, Huang’s father took her for further examinations, first at a local hospital, then at the Shanghai Mental Health Centre, where she was officially diagnosed with GID.

“That was towards the end of my being 17 and it was the first time I found out about GID,” she says. “If I had known it earlier, I wouldn’t have had to suffer all that.”

Following the diagnosis, Huang firmly held on to the idea that she had been born into the wrong body, and required corrective surgery. She continued to stress that she was not choosing to become a woman, but “recovering, going back to the way I was supposed to be”.

She was upset, she says, by previous media reports that depicted in detail how she had injected herself with hormones in her early years.

“We are not monsters. We were born girls, we just needed treatment,” she says. “Using words like ‘drug girls’ is portraying you as a pervert, like someone who wants to change himself into a girl by using drugs.”

Since posting about her experiences online, Huang says that there has been more understanding of her condition.

In January this year, after receiving her GID diagnosis, Huang returned to Suzhou to look for work, but was often turned down when employers saw “male” stamped on her ID card. For Huang, this only confirmed that she needed surgery. With the help of an NGO, she began contacting people who had undergone gender reassignment surgery overseas, and made an appointment with a doctor in Thailand for October. All that she needed were funds and signed permission from her parents.

Huang started writing about her experience on Weibo in May this year, making her story public and launching a Kickstarter campaign to fund her surgery. Donations flooded in for a few months, reaching more than 12,000 yuan, but eventually petered out far short of the 100,000 yuan she needed for the surgery and travel costs. When I visited her in June, Huang was wearing a dark T-shirt and baggy trousers. Her hair had grown down to her shoulders, pulled back into a loose ponytail. She looked like a woman and in her interactions with men in public, they now called her dajie, big sister.

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She had eventually found work at a fried chicken shop in Suzhou, standing over a pot of hot oil for 12-hour shifts. She had calculated how much of her salary she could save – 500 yuan for rent, a few yuan for food. She had not bought new clothes in months, and wore an oily grey shirt. Even so, she could save only a couple of thousand yuan a month.

A job was a job, and while the owner knew about her past, he told her to just “be herself”.

She had made no progress with her family, however. Though they had reached an uneasy consensus and her parents had stopped trying to convert her, they had not accepted her either.

I tried to contact her mother on WeChat, but she did not respond. Huang said lack of communication had been evident lately, even in response to her own messages.

“It’s a strategy,” she said, claiming her family were giving her the silent treatment and refusing to sign the permission for her reassignment surgery. She could not convince her parents to accompany her for her planned October appointment.

Having given one interview to Chinese news portal The Paper, in June, Huang’s family have not spoken publicly about her again. In that article, her mother, calling herself Liu Fang, said she felt confused and distressed; that she could accept Huang dressing as a woman, but the idea of surgery frightened her, because once Huang “crossed over” she could not go back.

One day in July, Liu erupted in a WeChat group. After Huang complained that her parents did not accept her, Liu wrote: “You’re always saying bad things about us behind our back, always saying we sent you in to get converted, sent you to prison. In your head, you believed we hated you. But we wanted what’s good for you […] You used to be so good, so obedient, so docile.”

“I’m the victim, too!” Huang retorted. “I don’t hate you, I wrote my experience down to report the school and save more innocent people.”

Without addressing her daughter directly, Liu went on to talk about the societal pressure she and her husband faced. Since Huang had posted her story online, Liu said that many comments had been attacks on her and her husband.

While her husband deleted Huang from his WeChat, Liu still talked with her child from time to time. But she could not understand “why Huang insisted on this path” of being a woman.

“Why do you listen to what other people say?” Huang asked on WeChat. “Why can’t you just listen to your own heart?”

“But your path […] you could have been a fine boy. I really couldn’t take it,” Liu replied. “Where have we gone wrong with you?”

Before Huang could answer, Liu continued, “I’ve given the wrong birth. I should have had you as a girl at the beginning, then all would have been well.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. Nor did I,” Huang replied. “We were both victims.” She then asked her mother to sign a permission slip for a surgery still perilously out of reach. Liu replied: “I’m busy at work.”

In March of last year, Liu posted a photo of Huang on WeChat. It was taken when she was in the care of Old Zhang. Dressed as a boy, head-to-toe in camouflage gear, she stands in the Chongqing schoolyard, her eyes cast towards the horizon, somewhere beyond the boundary walls.

Liu had clicked the “like” button on the photo and written underneath, “Little handsome boy”.