Sex, gender and sexuality at Rhodes

Sex, gender and sexuality are not always necessarily linked. What’s happening in your pants does not always correlate to what’s happening in your head. These statements will, over three or four years, become obvious, even core beliefs, of many of the incoming Rhodes University first-year students as they negotiate their way through gender politics on campus.

Many South Africans grow up in heteronormative communities due to religion, cultural values and Western capitalist societal impositions of the nuclear family. While many of those social situations can instil important values and traditions, they also perpetuate misconceptions about sex, gender and sexuality, and it is these misconceptions that a little time on Rhodes’ campus will begin to challenge and change.

Counter-acting misconceptions about how gender identity works are student societies such as the Gender Action Project (GAP) and OUTRhodes who run awareness campaigns throughout the academic year. They promote discussions and share resources dealing with gender identity so that students can explore their identities more thoroughly and with a larger set of tools, providing not only information, but also a community within which non-binary and queer students may feel safe and included.

In discussions of gender identity a misconception is that the term refers only to ideas about queer identities. What is important to remember is that talking about gender means talking about toxic or fragile masculinities, internalised misogyny and a host of other problems that are common to people across the sexuality spectrum.

Essentially, talking about gender identity means talking about politics. As has become patently clear following US President Trump’s gag law against abortion, and as any Humanities worth her salt will tell you, the personal is political. What could be more personal than your gender identity?

When I arrived four years ago, the assumption in my social circles was that Rhodes University is a safe space for exploring gender identity in whatever way that exploration might take place. The #RUReferenceList protests in 2016 exposed the ugly heart of rape culture on campus, but what I am sure of is that no such protest could have had its origins anywhere else.

What those protests are testament to is not only the bravery of so many womxn of colour who put their bodies on the line, but also the serious conversations that students are having out of class, in their bedrooms, dining halls and digs about gender identity and gendered experience.

Gendered experience refers to the way that a person’s life is influenced by their gender. Simply put: being a woman at Rhodes is a different experience to being a man at Rhodes which is a different experience to being a non-binary person at Rhodes. This seems obvious, but rape culture denialists will insist that everyone is being treated equally and similarly. Why then do we still have only one or two gender neutral bathrooms on campus? I’ll leave that one here for you to ponder.

A problem with the frustration I feel when I face resistance to these ideas, is that I spent my four years at Rhodes in a social and academic bubble that encouraged this kind of intellectual stretching.

A lot of other students do not have the social and academic opportunity, or the language tools, to engage with these ideas. Toxic masculinity, internalised misogyny, privilege, binaries, discourse, queer identity, womxn, heteronormativity – these can all be alienating terms because they are the jargon of the theory that is my everyday work but may not be the terrain of Accounting or Pharmacy students.

This is where the Sexual Violence Task Team (SVTT) comes in. Following the protests against rape culture the SVTT was established and in December 2016 published their final report which can be found online.

One of the recommendations made is that all students should be equipped with the skills to understand gender identity and how it influences social interactions, through a common course. By supporting the work of the SVTT, staff and students can change the university’s culture and make Rhodes’ campus a safer place for explorations of gender identity. • Chelsea Haith is a former Media Officer of GAP and an alumna of Rhodes’ English Department. She is now at UCT studying Gender and

Transformation.