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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

Faculty of Theology hosts annual meeting of Society for Practical Theology
2015-01-30

From the left are: Prof Yolanda Dreyer (Chairperson of SPTSA, University of Pretoria), Prof Johann Rossouw (UFS), Prof Hussein Solomon (UFS) and Prof Johan Cilliers (Stellenbosch University).
Photo: Michelle Nothling

The privilege of hosting the annual meeting of the Society for Practical Theology in South Africa (SPTSA) fell to the University of the Free State (UFS) this year. Delegates from across the country recently convened on the Bloemfontein Campus to attend the event from 21 – 23 January 2015.

The three-day congress saw several high-profile keynote speakers discussing the topic of ‘Power of religion and religions of power’.

Dr Johann Rossouw from the UFS Department of Philosophy presented a paper on ‘Power, the state and the church in South Africa’. Dr Rossouw regards the cooperation between theologians and philosophers as integral to help us understand the time we live in. Twenty years since the dawn of South Africa’s democracy, “the gap between the country we were promised and the country we received is bigger than ever,” Dr Rossouw said. “A South-African Church … cannot but make her voice heard regarding this gap.”

Expert on conflict resolution and fundamentalism, Prof Hussein Solomon from the UFS Department of Political Studies and Governance scrutinised the compatibility of Islam with democracy. He warned, though, against “the labelling of a conflict as religious on the mere basis of its religious overtones.” Prof Solomon’s paper, ‘Political Islam: trends, trajectory and future prospects,’ not only advocated tolerance and political pluralism, but also pointed to the fact that it is “in the common good of all humanity” to avert a “Clash of Civilizations”.

‘God in granite?’ – Prof Johan Cilliers’ paper – investigated the phenomenon of the monumentalization of religion. Prof Cilliers from Stellenbosch University explained that monuments often have “spiritual character and iconic value, in the sense that it offers a space for the formation or discovery of meaning.” In his presentation he showed, though, that monuments – even those connected to religious motifs – “seldom escape the lure of power”.

The event was organised by the University of the Free State’s Faculty of Theology, Department of Practical Theology.

  

For more information or enquiries contact news@ufs.ac.za .

 

 

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