Queer students battle for inclusion
LGBTQI+ students continue to come up against heteronormative, patriarchal attitudes despite universities’ attempts to neutralise gender
The youth grabbed Dewaldt Visser by the collar, spat in his face and said: “Fok off uit hierdie huis uit. Jy behoort nie hier nie.” (“Fuck off out of this house. You don’t belong here.”)
“He was one of the students living in the same residence as me; one of those guys who wear their khakis with an old South African flag on it. He didn’t like me because I am gay,” says Visser, who did not wish to use his real name.
Recalling his two years of living in an all-male residence at North-West University’s Potchefstroom campus, he says: “It’s extremely heteronormative, so if you’re seen as ‘other’ it is not a welcoming place.”
Financial constraints meant he had to continue living there.
“At the time I was dependent on my parents, and they wanted me to stay in that residence. They are very conservative and share the same worldview as those people in that residence.
“But as soon as I could move out, I did. My parents were distraught when they heard, though. They said I had let the Afrikaner culture down. We still don’t speak. But they don’t understand. It was rough. There were a lot of difficulties living there.”
Themba Sithole is a final-year student at the University of Pretoria.
“Residence culture is very Afrikaans, so integrating people of different race groups and sexual identities is very difficult,” says Sithole, who chose not have his real name used.
After initially living in one of the university’s all-male residences, he says: “At first, people in my residence didn’t know about my sexuality. But as time went on and they started realising I was gay, a lot of them were not willing to be around me. It became a problem, so I started withdrawing from res activities.”
He adds that moving into a private residence was “much better”.
The overly masculine culture in the university’s all-male residences is something Nicholas Lawrence is more than familiar with.
Lawrence, a former chairperson of the University of Pretoria’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) organisation, Up and Out, says its residences are generally not accepting of queer people.
“There was an incident last year where a young transgender man, who was transitioning at the time, was cornered and beaten up. It hurt him really badly. He was so traumatised by the experience that he couldn’t write his exams that year. It was just too much for him.”
Lawrence was part of a student-led initiative to have the university formulate an anti-homophobia policy. He was disappointed when the proposed policy was instead turned into a broader anti-discrimination policy.
Geoffrey Ogwaro is part of the committee tasked with drafting the anti-discrimination policy. He is a human rights advocate who specialises in LGBTI rights at the university’s Centre for Human Rights.
“After discussion by the committee, it was decided to broaden the scope of the policy. It is still in the process of being drafted but there will be sections within it that speak to homophobia and transphobia,” he says.
At the University of the Free State (UFS), a group of queer rights activists are working equally hard at “trying to find solutions for dealing with queer visibility on campus”.
At a Saturday morning meeting on campus, they established the Words With Action Gender Campaign.
Seoketsi Mooketsi, a third-year student and trans rights activist, says: “In addition to the need for genderneutral bathrooms and locker rooms, there is also a need for adequate healthcare and counselling for queer and trans people. The campus housing policy is also an issue as it sees students only as male or female, which does a disservice to trans students.”
Although he hails from the Free State, Boitumelo Sediti choose to study at the University of Cape Town (UCT).
“I come from the Free State, but I would never have applied to UFS. I have heard some horror stories about that university. I chose UCT because I believed there would be better opportunities to engage with issues of sexuality and identity.”
But Sediti still found his first year of living in an all-male residence difficult. “Finding myself having to assimilate to a certain level of masculinity was particularly hard,” he says, adding that the experience has spurred him on to take up a leadership position at the residence.
“I got to see how queer first-year students were going through the same thing I went through. So I wanted to try and provide them with a refuge of sorts and also advocate for the rights of minorities,” he says.
Lungile Lallie is a second-year student who has been living in the university’s Leo Marquard Hall residence for two years. He says: “At formal res meetings, people are no longer allowed to use gender-specific pronouns. We refer to ourselves as Maquardians instead. This might seem like a small thing to some, but it makes a huge, huge difference to people who find themselves occupying spaces where their identities are erased at all times.”
It was protests at that residence that gave birth to the #PatriarchyMustFall movement.
Nigel Patel, a queer rights activist, explains: “During the [September 2015] Leo Marquard interrogations [when the public questions students running for leadership positions], a black woman student asked what the student leaders were going to do about the patriarchy in the residence.
“Her microphone was cut as the question was asked and some members of the house started to chant the Marquard chant to silence her and get her off the stage.
“The next day, many UCT students went to the residence to hold the old leadership and incoming leadership to account. The space ended up becoming one where women and queer students shared their stories about sexual assault and discrimination within the residence space, specifically those gendered for men.
“The first problem, before you even set foot in the residence, is the system of gendered residences. For a long time, these have been sex-based placements. So if you were biologically female you would be placed in a residence for women and if you were biologically male you would be placed in a residence for men.”
A 2016 report by Josephine Cornell, Kopano Ratele and Shose Kessi looks into the challenges queer people face at higher learning institutions. Titled Race, Gender and Sexuality in Student Experiences of Violence and Resistances on a University Campus, the report says: “Globally, within dominant educational discourses, ideal students are still typically represented as white, middle-class, male, cisgender and heterosexual. Furthermore, students who occupy these categories tend to hold symbolic power within these institutions.
“As a result, those who fall outside these categories, such as black, female, working class and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex [LGBTQI] students question their belonging and experience a sense of alienation and exclusion.”
The report stated that students surveyed described cases of symbolic exclusion. “Particularly for transgender students, a form of symbolic violence or power they encountered daily was the paucity of gender-neutral bathrooms.”
One participant pointed out: “A fundamental biological function becomes complicated and painful. These students are required to put great effort and thought into the simple act of urinating, often experiencing great trauma.
“These experiences echo findings of other research, which indicates that transgender men, women and gender-nonconforming people are frequently ridiculed, insulted, physically attacked and sometimes arrested when they use public bathrooms. Consequently, they are often forced to plan visits to the bathroom carefully.”