Gathered around a common cause that’s dear to their heart, a group of young and motivated students adopted “gender and sexuality awareness” as a mission  that they chose to explore by creating an eponymous club, a first at USJ.

Nour Yaktine is the president of this club: undergoing her masters in clinical psychology and pathology, she   summarizes the purpose of the organization as: “a structure we invented, not only for our members to learn and express their sexual identities, but also raise awareness on the topic to the general public”. She also indicated that one of the reasons they went for a student’s club  is that when things come from an educational system, it changes people’s perspective.

Nour, Khaled, Celine, Layan and Alexis have set themselves the mission of breaking the taboo around gender and sexuality matters throughout this club. This interesting, even controversial topic to some, quickly gained traction, as ninety-two members are currently part of the club, joining via word of mouth or social media.

Raising public awareness on the issue of gender and sexuality is the ultimate goal of this club. Specifically, it is to become more familiar with the issue of gender by promoting sex education and creating a form for members to learn, discuss and be able to express their gender and sexuality in an educational and constructive way. When asked about the clubs’ purpose, vice-president Khaled El Samra, a first-year social work student, stated that he is looking forward to “making the university a better place for everyone, even 1% better”. 

During our conversation, Nour and Khaled clarified the difference between the two terms “gender” and “sexuality”: gender identity differs from sexual identity and is not related to an individual's sexual orientation. “Sexual identity is the biologically assigned sex that you can clearly perceive since birth through a person’s sexual organs”, explains Nour, continuing:  “gender is a social construct, it’s not necessarily related to sex”, an idea that Khaled developed saying: “someone’s sexuality refers to who you are attracted to sexually and/or romantically”.

The whole point of raising awareness is broadening the horizons of said awareness. The activities such as seminars, campaigns, workshops, trivia nights and collaborations with other USJ clubs are not only available to the club’s members, but also to students in and outside the University.

On Wednesday  November 25th’s night, the club gathered its members on the platform Microsoft Teams to introduce the club, its goals, suggestions, and the members to each other. During this meeting, a member talked about the false perception that society has towards this subject: “people judge the LGBT community  because they don’t know who we are”. Other members added on “you get weird looks; you get lots of stuff…but now we're  used to that”. Fortunately, the club is all about creating a safe space for students to learn about gender and sexuality and express their own. “We’re in it for the long run” said the vice president while pointing out that it is a demanding goal. “At  the end of the day, don’t we all have our own gender and sexuality?” concluded Nour.

All in all, this group encourages respect for all, diversity of opinions, non-judgment, and nondiscrimination. In the fullness of time, wouldn’t it be nice to have equal rights?