I am George. I have been George since February, and incidentally, I have also been LGBTQ rep for St Hugh’s JCR for almost as much time. My coming out as trans in college came in the form of unrelentingly flamboyant manifestos which identified me as “George Haggett, The Hughsie Formerly known as Emma Haggett,” and I’m pleased to say that nobody batted an eyelid.

Or, perhaps I should say that they didn’t bat an eyelid at my being trans.

On the day that elections were held, a Versa article entitled ‘Why LGBTQ Reps are a Terrible, Patronising Idea’ was written anonymously by a member of my college. The assertion was that “the notion of an ‘LGBTQ community’ that might be represented by its own elected officer is nonsense”. The tone was patronising and damning.

Happily, the reaction was largely an affronted one, with comments ranging from the edifying, “There are groups of people who have the same obstacles placed in their way, and who have the same privileges denied to them,” to the dismissive, “U wanker”, to the defiant,”THE QUEER SPRING IS COMING.”

Confronted with the fact that my first move as rep would have to be in response to this, I wrote a very softly-softly response article in the college newspaper. In it, I acknowledged that post-modern identity politics have, to a certain extent, elevated the things that we do into the things that we are.

And it’s true. Perhaps I’ve read too much Butler this year (is it even possible to read too much Butler?) but a number of my friends have found that to approach gender, sexuality, and romantic attraction in terms of constructs which we can navigate is liberating, empowering, and flexible.

This kind of thinking gives marginalised identities meaningful agency. It allows us all to reject well-meaning but oppressive born “this way” arguments which teleologically lead to the pursuit of the “gay gene” and “male/female brains” (*shudder*).

It also thoroughly rejects the “lame categorisation” to which the Versa author so pointedly objected, without ignoring the reality that human subjects don’t live in a vacuum.

Of course many of us can’t be pigeon-holed, but that doesn’t mean that a heteronormative and cis-sexist society doesn’t try damn hard to do that – and in doing so, as the commenter above rightly pointed out, deny LGBTQ people certain privileges and oppress us in certain ways.

As I hope I’m making clear, the complexity of human identities is the real issue here, and Versa sorely missed it.

I don’t think that anybody’s advocating a transcendent, homogenising Queergeist spearheaded by an omniscient oracle; being a minorities rep is multifaceted and challenging.

Aside from officially addressing specific oppressions faced by LGBTQ undergrads, a rep has to support the person who had a slur shouted at them in the street, or is facing familial rejection, or thinks they may want to transition but has no idea where to start. Perhaps most importantly of all, an LGBTQ rep understands the importance of having an exceptionally strong tea and cake game.

Unfortunately, some of the specific oppressions that I’m referring to got a little bit too specific last term. We changed the name of our first Bop from ‘Queer’ to ‘Express Yourself’ amid two camps of concern: on one side, the really rather legitimate qualms which some LGBTQ JCR members had about potential appropriation and the fact that the term ‘queer’ has not been fully reclaimed by everybody, and on the other, the altogether less legitimate complaint that, “We wouldn’t have a straight bop,” and, “Bops are for everyone, so why is this aimed at just this one group?”

The compromise that ensued unfortunately ended up feeling a bit like erasure for some of us, but hopefully that can be cathartically remedied by something along the lines of a PRIDE BOP next year.

That being said, in conjunction with some really quite off-colour “banter” among a few individuals on the JCR Facebook page the night before rep elections, Hilary term wasn’t the easiest of terms to be LGBTQ at St Hugh’s. While I’m confident that what happened was a result of people who were at best ill-informed and at worst being thoughtless and silly, it became apparent that something needed to be done.

Whether or not some of the less than ideal events of last term would’ve happened had we had an existing LGBTQ rep is impossible to say, but now we do there’s a lot that we can do to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

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Hugh’s now proudly sports an LGBTQ committee, which is planning three 101 talks this term in acknowledgement of the fact that not everybody who comes to Oxford has necessarily known many people who aren’t cis and straight. Hopefully they’ll be well-attended and reflect how open-minded and accepting I know, from my experience of coming out as trans, that my college can be.

Of course it’s impossible to represent the entire LGBTQ community all of the time. But what the author of the Versa article failed to understand is that that is part-and-parcel of its wonderful diversity, and I wouldn’t change that for the world. But my job is literally just to care about how LGBTQ people in the college that I love are getting on and to have their backs, and it’s only a shame that that position was so thoroughly vindicated last term.

I am consequently insurmountably grateful to the people who worked hard to make the role a reality, and humbled that I have to opportunity to look out for such a great group of people.

We’re in the middle of a housing crisis. There’s no way of escaping that. Despite a population twice the size of Canada, housebuilding in Britain is half theirs.  The Tory plan to extend the ‘right to buy’ to housing association tenants will be hailed by some as an example of how the Conservatives are on the side of the low paid working-classes. These are after all, supposedly, the tenants of housing association properties. The reality is far different. And the Conservatives’ resurrection of ‘right to buy’, jolted into life as if a zombie Thatcher walks the halls of Downing Street, is only going to make things worse.

I spent the first five years of my life living in a housing association terrace. I don’t live there any longer, and nor does my family. My parents saved up a bit, waited for their wages to increase, and when they finally scraped together enough for a deposit thanks to a bit of family assistance, they got a mortgage and bought their own house.    When we moved out, a new family moved in. No loss to the housing stock. This is how social housing is meant to work.

Like Rowntree’s cycle of poverty, there’s a cycle of housing. And from this cycle, a scapegoat appears: the tenants that prefer to stay in their homes. These tenants are being used to make the extension of ‘right to buy’ a catch-all solution to the housing crisis. The line of argument goes as follows; these tenants are (stubbornly) staying in their houses that they love too long, and are crying out to be allowed to buy their houses and free up capital for more houses to be built.

Never mind the fact that successive governments since Thatcher have failed to build enough social housing, local authority housing continuing to decrease year-on-year. Never mind the fact that many of these tenants can’t afford, or just can’t have (for employment reasons) a mortgage. Never mind the fact that these people are paying rent already. “Let these tenants buy their houses, and all will be well.” These tenants are being used as a means of fulfilling a costly manifesto pledge, to build more housing.

And let’s not forget that the only people that will be able to afford their housing association terraces will be the more affluent of the working-classes. As these workers buy their homes, how can we be sure that the money will actually be spent on new homes? Housing associations are actually in a large amount of debt which rents primarily service. The Tories would have to force housing associations to build more homes, which is ideologically the same as forcing the Co-op to build more stores.

If the housing stock is progressively sold-off to the better-off workers, we run the risk of ghettoisation and marginalisation. If you’re a fairly well-off young family with small children, you’re probably not going to want to buy a house on a street of problem families or drug addicts. Whereas the nicer streets will be quickly snapped-up. The result will be housing associations with housing stocks comprising of the marginalised in society, with declining house values, while the nicer streets will be quickly rising in value. This is just what happened in the 1950s and 1960s under Macmillan, as ‘new estates’ hailed as bastions of a ‘classless society’ were quickly carved up into no-go streets.

Of course, this is exactly what some hard-right Tories would surely like. With some form of Benthamite Victorian relish, social housing becomes a deterrent, like the rest of the welfare system, to get people to aspire out of their class. The streets of the working-classes, once slums, now council estates, become slums again. The extension of the ‘right to buy’ is just a further example of divide and rule. Dividing between property-owners and tenants. Last year, Britain built 141,000 homes, far short of the abandoned 240,000 target set by Labour in 2007. Can the Conservatives really be trusted to ensure more social housing is built with money that isn’t even theirs? We’ll find out on May 7th.