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07 March 2019 | Story Rulanzen Martin | Photo Rulanzen Martin
CGAS staff with Jessica Lynn
From left: Ankia Bradfield, Sihle Salman, Jessica Lynn, Dr Nadine Lake, programme director, Gender Studies, and Dr Stephanie Cawood, director of CGAS after the talk.

For Jessica Lynn, a transgender activist, referencing the Butterfly to tell her journey, is the perfect metaphor to raise awareness of transgender issues. The Centre for Gender and Africa studies (CGAS) at the University of the Free State (UFS) hosted Lynn at a seminar titled, The Butterfly Project.

The CGAS invited Lynn in an effort to educate and inform students of her own experience as a parent living as a transgender woman. She is a global ambassador at the Kinsey Institute.

Coping mechanisms to escape reality

Born Jeffery Alan Butterworth in 1965, Lynn has become a world-renowned, dynamic and hard-hitting transgender activist. Lynn started her seminar off with: “Who here knows someone that is part of the transgender community?” It was evident that not many people know someone who is transgender. “In the United States only 16% of the population knows someone who is transgender,” she said.

“Everybody has their own story, just like I am only one of the 1.4 million transgender stories in the United States (US).” As a child of English immigrants to the US she was raised as a boy. “At a very young age I wanted to be girl,” she says, “but in 1969 it was not something that was spoken about..”

She started doing photography, painting and sports to stop the feelings she had to become a girl. She became obsessed with painting. “When I am painting that eagle I became that eagle in order to escape my reality.” She came out to her children as transgender during December 2009. She fully transitioned in 2010.

Lynn is the mother of three boys and was married to their biological mother. A botched Texas court restricted her access to her youngest child and to this day she has not been able to see her son.

Transgender discussions on rise in South Africa

“Transgender discussions have been less salient than conversations around homosexuality in South Africa,” said Dr Nadine Lake, programme director for Gender Studies at the UFS.  “But it is clear that raising awareness around transgender issues is starting to take more ground.”

Transgender identity and trans-body rights emerged during the #RhodesMustFall movement in 2015. “It was university students that were primarily driving the transformation agenda,” said Dr Lake.

The seminar on 20 February 2019 was an emotional, explosive and honest narrative of Jessica Lynn cocooning from Jeffrey Alan Butterworth to the phenomenal women she is today.

 

News Archive

School of Nursing receives a considerable grant
2011-06-01

Our School of Nursing once again became the proud recipient of a grant from the Atlantic Philanthropies, an international organization dedicated to “bringing about lasting changes in the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people”.

Atlantic Philanthropies granted millions of rands to South African nursing training institutions via University Based Nursing Education (UNEDSA), which will provide six recipient institutions the opportunity to transform nursing academic programmes in South Africa over a period of four years.

We recently received a R3 100 000 grant for the school to transform nursing scholarship and clinical practice. This is but the latest installment in a total grant of R16 million.

The School of Nursing, under the leadership of Prof. Anita van der Merwe, former Head of the School of Nursing, submitted a proposal to UNEDSA and was selected as one of the six recipients of the award. The school is now at the beginning of the third financial year of the project.

According to Dr Annali Fichardt from the School of Nursing, the school established a unique Virtual Health Teaching and Learning facility for training students in a non-threatening, simulated environment and to prepare nurses to be capable and to function optimally in the dynamic health-care environment. This provides opportunities for experimentation and sharing of integrated teaching and learning in nursing education.

The project helped establish a new unit for continuing professional development and research capacity development to serve practicing nurses and staff members of the School of Nursing. These initiatives will result in a fully transformed and accredited portfolio of programmes at undergraduate, post-basic and postgraduate levels to meet the needs of a range of health-care settings and learners.

The School of Nursing hopes to create an innovative teaching and learning environment that empowers students and professional nurses to become clinically excellent, able to practice independently in both resource-poor and technology-rich areas, and manage such complexities in an innovative way.

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