“I was kicked out of a house when coming out as trans to my flatmates and asking they use my preferred name and pronouns.”
“[I was] asked to leave a flat when someone suspected I was ‘a faggot.’”
“They said they wouldn’t be comfortable with a gay couple moving in.”
“An old flatmate’s girlfriend was visibly uncomfortable interacting with me… I used to hate it when she came over.”
“My flatmate’s boyfriend often made questionable comments about queer people in front of me and she did nothing to stop it”.
These are just a few of the 894 survey responses that housing and health researcher Brodie Fraser from the University of Otago has analysed in an academic paper published this morning. The paper, Flatting amongst LGBTQI+ people in Aotearoa New Zealand, finds that over half of the queer flatter participants experienced housing discrimination. Homeowners experienced it too, though at lower levels. Homophobia and transphobia came from flatmates, landlords, property managers, visitors, real estate agents and neighbours. Read more