‘You must be thinking what a lesbian man teacher is doing in a nice place like Dipane Letsie School?’: enacting, negotiating and reproducing dominant understandings of gender in a rural school in the Free State, South Africa

The title for this article is taken from a quotation from Thatho,1 a life orientation (LO)2

educator, teaching in Dipane Letsie School in Qwaqwa in the east of the Free State Province, and who narrates how the construction of sexuality and gender interact and shape his3 experience as a transgendered person living in a rural space. Thatho uses the identity ‘lesbian man’, a nebulous and hard to explain category that emerges from my research, but in the words of Thatho, someone who ‘is born as a woman but who identifies now as a man and who has sex with women’. Thatho does use the term transgender, albeit only once and much later in our interview, to refer to himself interchangeably with ‘lesbian man’ but mostly ‘man’. Paraphrasing Thatho, the term transgender is used to describe an individual whose gender identity does not match their assigned birth gender. In other words, it describes people whose gender identity or expression falls

outside the boundaries of traditional gender expectations (McCarthy 2003). In this article, I use the term ‘transgender’ to refer to female-to-male (transgender man) and male-to-female (transgender woman).