Manchester has had at least forty years of being an alleged ‘gay capital’ of the UK, but never any special council-funded 'gay' housing, until 2024. In the wake of a unanimous decision by Manchester City Council in 2022 that “We believe that trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary individuals are non-binary”, the Council has now approved planning for its new 'flagship' extra care housing project in the south of the city, for LGBTQ+ people over 55 “and allies”.
The new housing is being developed by Manchester City Council, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transexual (LGBT) Foundation, and the Great Places Housing Group. As Gavin White for Manchester City Council explained, “The Russell Road scheme is a flagship, first-of-its-kind development that will create a safe and welcoming housing community for older LGBTQ+ people in Manchester". The Council hopes to “provide an open and inclusive place of psychological safety for the older LGBTQ+ community”. An LGBT Foundation report shares the same vision:
The generations who fought for our LGBT rights in decades past may find themselves isolated and fearful of the future, dreaming of a housing scheme where they could live out the rest of their lives with others from their family of choice, where they did not have to hide their identity or fear homophobia, biphobia or transphobia.
Lesbophobia presumably does not exist, as it has no name.
The words above, “The generations who fought for our LGBT rights in decades past”, are deceptive. The acronym LGBT was not used until the early 1990s, so to speak of generations before that fighting for LGBT rights is to rename former gay rights activists without their consent. Nevertheless, Stonewall Housing say they have helped to create safe spaces for LGBTQ+ people since 1983. This would mean that Stonewall Housing was active six years before Stonewall itself was founded in 1989. Similarly, the LGBT Foundation say their work started in 1975 “and we've been changing the lives of LGBT people ever since” but as recently as 2015, the LGBT Foundation were the Lesbian and Gay Foundation. Before that, they were Gay Switchboard, a phone line set up by and for gay men.
Sue Westwood, a senior lecturer at York Law School who has conducted research into the housing preferences of LGBT people in the UK, has written about how the older LGBTQ+ community does not have homogeneous housing needs as it is not a coherent community. Her research suggested that mixed LGBT accommodation was the least preferred option among the women she surveyed. Westwood's research also found gay men predominated within 'the voice' of LGBTQ+, and that lesbians, especially older lesbians, tended to be excluded. She is not the only researcher to suggest that sex is a more relevant characteristic to lesbians than LGBTQ+ affiliation, and that given the choice lesbians would opt for single sex housing (which in Manchester, for instance, was not an option). Another researcher, Stephen Pugh, likewise concluded that belief in a unitary gay community in which lesbians and gay men are equally represented and resourced is a myth. Although it would be simpler for policy makers if lesbians and gay men (not to speak of the rest of the rainbow) lived similar lives and had common interests, the reality is that on the whole they do not.
Westwood's research goes to the heart of the matter. Whereas many studies into LGBT housing ask binary questions, with those participating being asked if they would prefer standard or LGBT-tailored housing provision, Westwood asked more open questions, allowing a wider field of responses. The majority of women participants in her research (62%) expressed a preference for non-mainstream housing provision, with an even split between those wanting women-only and those wanting lesbian-only accommodation, but the majority of women who had opted as first choice for lesbian-only accommodation chose women-only as their second preference. Among these women the least popular option was mixed LGBT accommodation. By contrast, most (56%) of gay men chose mainstream provision as their preferred first option, and gay men-only accommodation (25%) as their second.
Westwood also cites the work of Jane Traies, who questioned four hundred older lesbians in the UK and found gender-specific (she does use the term 'gender') and/or gender--and sexuality-specific housing was the preference of the majority of the women she spoke to. They did not prefer LGBTQ+ housing.
Are Manchester City Council, Great Places, and the LGBT Foundation unaware of this research? Assuming they live in the same world as the rest of us, why do they insist on pushing this fake and homogenising term LGBT (the housing project is now tagged LGBTQ+) as if no other views exist? What is the force, or who are the players who are driving this? Not only academic but legal and professional challenges to the term continue in the UK and globally. This 'flagship' housing project has arisen over the same years that this language has been shoe-horned into schools, churches, companies, the NHS and most other aspects of public, and even private, life.
According to the LGBT Foundation, Manchester Council started discussing a dedicated LGBTQ+ housing project in 2014. By 2017, it had agreed a scheme in principle, and in 2018 located a site. In 2020, the LGBT Foundation published a report titled ‘Housing, Ageing and Care’. Homes England were the funder, and the remit was “to better understand the housing and support needs of LGBT people aged 55+ in Greater Manchester and involve them in strategic planning, including the country’s first purpose-built LGBT Extra Care Scheme”. Given the chronology above, this was a bit late. This report was published three years after Sue Westwood's research and eighteen years after Pugh's, but it makes no reference to them. It has few references of any kind.
How are we to understand this lack of interest in their own field of study by the LGBT Foundation? The report's subtitle, 'What Manchester’s LGBT Communities Want from the UK’s First Purpose-built LGBT Extra Care Scheme', shows a closed and predetermining research direction. The choice on offer is (ironically) binary: standard housing or LGBT housing. This is exactly what Sue Westwood commented on, and is a classic Chomskian manufacture of consent by corralling people's thinking. An illusion of choice is produced at precisely the moment that imagination is curtailed by the terms of reference offered, echoes of the trans project itself.
The report is copiously illustrated with drawings which seem to have been created specifically for this publication. This must have taken a lot of money and seems an unusual priority for a research project intended to inform policy. It would be an expected priority for a publication intended to influence readers.
There are reasons to doubt the research competence of the report. Pressed on its authorship, LGBT Foundation wrote in an email to me:
In terms of the author, the work was steered by Bob Green OBE who kindly provided the foreword to the report and has 30+ years of experience working in the social housing sector, including 14 years as the CEO of Stonewall Housing, a sector leading charity working to support LGBTQ+ people of all ages experiencing homelessness or living in an unsafe environment.
Bob Green, then, wrote the one-page introduction. The authors or researchers of the body of the report are unknown. LGBT Foundation could not give any detailed information about funding, including for the illustrations, stating, “The funding for the project was funded from a wider funding agreement to assess housing needs in the region rather than from a specific commission”. As we have seen, closed questions and a degree of implicit bias cast doubt on whether this report and the research behind it really was an assessment as opposed to an attempt to produce evidence to support decisions which had already been made. Astonishingly, the report has no link to any data behind the bar charts and no methodology worth the name. Neither is it possible to view the original questionnaire or their original outreach message through the LGBT Foundation since they can't provide this, solidifying doubt as to whether they are a credible research outlet of any kind, let alone of a standard to brief local government.
There was no apology or embarrassment about this. A research employee at LGBT Foundation replied to questions about methodology in the report by saying:
For research methodologies, I’d like to signpost you to our Ethical Research Guidance document that aims to aid researchers in identifying, understanding and resolving ethical issues at all stages of the research process, with added focus on how these issues might apply to work with lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) communities.
They did not recognise a methodological question which was not LGBT-related. For instance, what was the original questionnaire that was sent out? (Was it always sent out? Their single paragraph on methodology states, “People were given the option to either respond online, over the phone or via post [emphasis added]"). Declining to share your original questionnaire may be disorganisation, or it may be because researchers cherry-pick which questions to write up. With hindsight, questions can prove to have been badly worded and produce unclear responses. Competent researchers review their process and reflect on their methodology when writing up results. The LGBT Foundation lack this kind of normal, academic self-critique and communicate from a haze of self-congratulation which answered critical questions with, “Thank you for your prompt reply and interest in this trailblazing piece of work”. Manchester is full of universities. There must be thousands of competent researchers in the city. Was no-one versed in the basics able to join this team? Or is their research, like the whole of their website, more akin to advertising than anything else because an image of a lifestyle is being sold?
Although they are supposedly competent to produce research on any areas on anything to do with LGBTQ+ people, the LGBT Foundation seem unaware of the problems inherent in researching an area in which they have a stake. The Government’s data quality framework, under the section headed ‘Accuracy’, states, “Bias in data may impact accuracy. When data is biased it means that it is not representative of the entire population. Account for bias in your measurements if possible, and make sure that data bias is communicated to your users”. The users here are the Council and other partners in this housing scheme, and the generator of the data is the LGBT Foundation. Local authorities and others who allow their policy to be influenced by them must inspect their data very closely.
Not only the Council, but satellite partners to the new housing project, like the housing foundation HouseProud promote trans issues, assimilated into the rainbow clump, as unproblematic. HouseProud has recently merged with The Peabody Trust, set up by George Peabody in 1862 to provide quality housing for the poor, and their board now includes not only individuals with careers in social housing, but people like Sophie Collinge whose profile is mostly related to trans experience, less so to housing. Perhaps the new project needs an 'OWLS' officer, an acronym that could be coined for older women, lesbian or not, who want to live in single sex housing. Older lesbians are presumably a prime target for the Russell Road housing, which is aimed at older people. Given this focus, it is surprising that in the LGBT Foundation report cited above, most respondents were aged under 55. The report states, "Given the nature of the survey, it is unsurprising that there were a larger proportion of older people who had responded, and this therefore could justify further analysis looking at the responses of just those over 55, to see if there are any significant differences". There are odd parameters of what is surprising here. Why doesn't the text say, "Given the nature of the survey, it is surprising that about half the respondents were under fifty five?" Maybe that literally wasn't surprising because no special effort had been made to reach older people. It is, of course, possible to justify asking younger people about their housing aspirations for later life as part of good planning.
In reality the demographic of the new Russell Road Housing Scheme will be so mixed as to be unnameable, with only 51% of the housing for LGBTQ+ "and allies". Helen Spencer for Great Places explains, "We believe this scheme will not only meet the specific needs and aspirations of the LGBT+ community, but also enhance the diversity and vibrancy of Whalley Range as a neighbourhood". The new housing will be very near the Muslim Heritage Centre.
Providers of social housing may be motivated altruistically, but actual bricks and mortar follow money. Therefore, it’s likely the money or promises of it moved first, in this case, sometime before 2014. The idea that a large co-housing project will provide a kind of community haven for older people who have sparse blood family networks, could be inspirational, but the internally contradictory LGBTQ+ clump brand hampers the vision. Care home staff can display homophobia and other discrimination on the basis of sexuality or gender-presentation, and some older gay men and lesbians, or members of the LGBTQ+ group are aware of this and fearful of what it could mean for them in older age. Whether this calls for specific housing provision is another question and quite a leap. Educating people's existing world views out of them is a popular pastime for authorities in this age, but top-down 'reframing' of thinking through expert input will only ever work with a part of the population. If, for instance, the notion of gender identity is forced on us (despite decades of critique) these attempts at re-education may fail and backfire drastically. Unfortunately, the backlash could target individuals critical of gender identity, but netted into the internally contradictory LGBTQ+ brand and its implications in law and life.
