Who Gets to Belong Here Now?

Fairness, identity, and why structural inequality doesn’t stay outside the door (or subscription model)

p.s there is a voice over on the way, when the elctrician has stopped drilling, and my wifi connection is stable!

I have this urgent need to lay something out and capture the rich, complicated history of the spaces that have shaped me and quietly excluded others. I’ve belonged to women-only forums, memberships, led a women only charity and enjoyed queer bars, activist groups, and the like. I’ve loved them, I’ve needed them, but I’ve also seen how structural inequality walks straight in, even when you think you’ve locked the door behind it. This isn’t a nostalgic piece. It’s a reckoning. Because when we talk about community, fairness, or even who gets to be here on Substack, we’re never just talking about content. We’re talking about power.

I’ve found belonging in rooms built with care, but never free from power. These spaces taught me who I was and who I wasn’t meant to be. As a psychologist, I’m interested in how women understand their identities, but I’m even more interested in what happens when the space stops recognising them.

Years ago, I helped host a women-only space at Manchester Pride. I was chair of the Lesbian Community Project (LCP) for a short while, this was - to my knowledge, the only UK dedicated, full-time charity committed to addressing the unique challenges faced by lesbian and bisexual women, including discrimination, isolation, and lack of representation. It occupied a building on Sidney Street off Oxford Road, next to the Manchester Met Students union, and wonderfully, a short distance from the Eighth Day vegan deli.

In the mid-2000s, Women’s Space was a spin off group of the LCP, and the aim was to create a quieter, safer, more spacious environment for women during the festival. Shamefully I couldn’t tell you who started Women’s Space and I can’t find any orginal online records of the first event - though I suspect there will be some print archives with detail. Certainly, by the time I joined organising group as an LCP member, (I found myself unexpectedly chairing the whole thing), there’d been a wholesale change of committee (often the case when power, politics and lack of funding are at play!) We told ourselves it was especially needed by women with families. Young children were welcome. The space also created a platform and stage for women and queer artists like Rosi Lugosi and Bethany Black, who were absent from the ‘mainstage’. At the time, it felt important to make room. So many women felt unseen or overwhelmed by the masculine energy of pride, the lack of disabled access to many venues and the drinking and drugs culture that had boomed in the 90’s and early noughties.

One of the motivations for writing this piece is the quiet frustration I feel at how little digital trace there is of that work. We wrote strategy documents. We fundraised. We hosted an event in a tent in a car park on the outskirts of the pride space, sure, but also a whole infrastructure of care and intention. I remember writing, in one of our funding application documents, that we hoped to host the Women’s Space until it was no longer needed. The goal was always to make our services redundant. In many ways, Pride has moved on and so have I.

But I have this urgent need to lay it all out, to capture some of this rich personal history while I still can. Because what we built mattered. Because women’s organising in the 2000s is part of the foundation of what exists now. And because memory, like belonging, isn’t automatic. It has to be nurtured.

Even at the time, I remember feeling uneasy. There was a part of me that recognised how much we needed that space, and another part that couldn’t ignore how its existence also marked a kind of division. Not all women felt welcome. Not all of the community understood it. And if I’m honest, those boundaries, who we thought we were protecting, and who got left out, didn’t sit comfortably.

We said we were creating safety, and I believe we were trying to. But the logic of who gets to be in the room often quietly maps onto existing power, not care. I look back now and realise how often trans women were the ones edged out. Not always explicitly, but structurally. At the time, few of us had the language or the courage to say plainly: trans women are women. I do now.

Before I joned the LCP, earlier in the 2000s, I was working as a management consultant and living in Pimlico, London, miles from Manchester and community I’d known through university. Canal Street had been its own ecosystem, noisy, defiant, and alive, but also fragmented and politicised in ways I was only beginning to understand., especially that Queer community didn’t always mean inclusive community.

And so it was through an online forum, Gingerbeer, that I found belonging again. Gingerbeer was a London-based community for lesbian and bisexual women. It started on 1 January 2000 and hosted a lively forum, that accomodated big characters and lots of hook-ups . Through Gingerbeer, I found one of the first spaces where I could explore my sexuality more openly, even if I hadn’t quite come out yet let alone kissed a girl.

One of the ‘in person’ things I did was to meet someone (presumably a moderator or volunteer at Gingerbeer) at the top of the escalators at Euston, they walked me to the Glass Bar, created by Elaine McKenzie, a small, strange, very dark, if my memory serves me right and brilliant queer venue housed in the West Lodge of Euston station. I think the building’s a pub now, but back then it was members only, and there was this huge imposing door. No wonder that folk we often accompanied on their first visit!

I found a wonderful extract on the internet that talks about this, Authors Bob Mills and Lo Marshall write for UCL:

“McKenzie [Glass Bar founder] had found London’s queer venues to be dominated by white lesbian and gay people, and as a result, in her words, ‘cold and cliquey’; she’s recounted that as ‘a Black gay person you had parties in odd places’. She wanted to provide a welcoming space for all women... The membership model and £1 joining fee enabled McKenzie to prioritise women’s access. Her policy was, she says, ‘if you identified as a woman, that’s it you could come […] so we had cis and trans women in.’”
(Mills & Marshall, 2024)

Reading that quote now, I’m struck by how intentional that space was. It existed because people knew that simply calling something "inclusive" didn’t make it so. Gingerbeer and The Glass Bar felt like home because someone had done the work of making room.

The Glass bar, like gingerbeer and the LCP and Women’s Space are all now history – you’d only know about them if you’d been there and lived and breathed it. The 1970’s uni tower block (Aytoun) next to Canal Street is also long gone (less bothered by that actually, it was freezing!), and the bar I frequented the most, and hosted my (1^st) wedding reception in ‘Taurus’ is also closed.

It’s worth noting, that one of the first bars I ever went to on canal street as a student Mantos, way before I ever stepped foot in Glass Bar , hard to find unless you had a guide, but with its imposing door, was a very different vibe. It had a deliberately designed glass front, the whole point was to make that bar and queerness visible. If you’ve ever watched Queer as Folk, it was featured, one of my uni friends cousins was an extra in that cult series– we never heard the end of that!

My coming out story is for another time (it didn’t really happen until 2005), but I often joke that when you’re bi, you have to come out continuously. Every new space, every new assumption. I’m married to a bloke now, but before that I was married to a woman, and my sexuality hasn’t gone anywhere. For a long time, I was quietly bothered that people just assumed I was straight. I’m more at ease with it now. But I still think it matters to say.

Sexuality, like identity more broadly, isn’t a fixed point. It’s a process of becoming. and continual negotiation between how you see yourself and how the world sees you. And honestly, the same could be said for entrepreneurship. Or writing. Or building a body of work in a public space.

Belonging doesn’t arrive with a certificate. It’s built and rebuilt through every interaction, every glance, every policy, every homepage spotlight. And sometimes, when that belonging slips, or is quietly overwritten, it aches.

Which brings me, to Substack.

The recent arrival of celebrity writers to this platform has stirred a familiar feeling for many independent creators. There’s been pushback, fatigue, frustration. And while it might seem like a small thing in the scheme of everything else going on in the world, I don’t think the reaction is trivial. I think it taps into something deeper.

I’m a social psychologist who studies what happens in online spaces, particularly for women who freelance, lead, or create things with very little structural support. But I don’t just study identity because it’s useful. I study it because I love it. Because I’m endlessly fascinated by how we come to understand ourselves, and each other, in all our contradictions.

One of the most enduring theories in my field is Social Identity Theory, developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner. It suggests that we don’t just understand ourselves as individuals, but also as members of social groups. Belonging to a group gives us pride, connection, meaning. But it also sets up a basic psychological tension. The moment we categorise people into “us” and “them,” we create in-groups and out-groups. And when our in-group feels threatened, by exclusion, invisibility, or shifting values, it triggers a deeply emotional response. We’re wired to protect what helps us feel seen.

Social Identity Theory helps us make sense of where the lines come from, but it also helps us imagine where they might soften.

Substack, like many platforms before it, feels like it was meant for the independents. The underdogs. The thoughtful slow-writers. The people making meaning, not just noise. But the truth is, visibility was never distributed equally. Not here. Not anywhere.

There’s a deep longing, I think, to find a space where the rules are clear and the values are shared and we don’t have to keep defending our right to be here. But, we live in systems that were not designed with equity in mind and every attempt to build something better, whether it’s a women’s space or an independent writing platform, carries with it that tension. That push and pull between wanting safety and creating exclusion. Between wanting fairness and grappling with power.

There’s a growing body of social science research that helps explain what’s going on under the surface of these moments, not just emotionally, but structurally and psychologically.

Litt and Hargittai (2016) explored how people perceive and interpret what platforms allow them to do—what they call perceived affordances in their article titled "The Imagined Audience on Social Network Sites" They say it is not just about what a platform is technically capable of, but what users think it’s for, who they think it’s for, and what kinds of behaviour they believe will be rewarded. They found that people bring their own expectations and histories into online spaces, and that these expectations shape not only how they act, but how they evaluate fairness and belonging.

That feels deeply relevant here. For many independent writers, Substack felt like a place designed for them, a space that rewarded thoughtfulness, niche interests, intimacy. A space that didn’t rely on search engine optimisation or performative reels. But when high-profile individuals arrive and are immediately promoted, it shatters those expectations. It’s not just that a celebrity is present, it’s that their presence appears to rewrite what the space is for and who it now belongs to. Litt and Hargittai help us see that these shifts in perceived purpose aren’t just technical, they’re social and emotional, too.

These broader patterns are also reflected in my own research on women entrepreneurs navigating online spaces. In There’s No Comparison (Ainge & Newman 2022), I found that imposter phenomenon was often exacerbated by the invisibility of structural advantage in entrepreneurial communities. Women weren’t simply comparing credentials or content , they were negotiating status, legitimacy, and identity in spaces that promised equality but rarely delivered it.

“Not This One”: Social Movements, the Attention Economy, and Microcelebrity Networked Activism is a paper by Zeynep Tufekci (2013) and is particularly useful here, not just because of what she argues, but because of the context in which she’s writing. Her work emerges from fieldwork on social movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy, where digital platforms enabled people to organise outside traditional hierarchies. These were moments of real breakthrough, where it looked like visibility might finally mean power.

But what Tufekci saw was that even in those moments, existing inequalities didn’t disappear, they just reconfigured. Her paper interrogates the seductive promise of platforms: that anyone can be seen, heard, understood and she shows how attention is mistaken for influence, and how visibility alone is not enough, particularly when the underlying systems still reward the already-powerful.

What makes her work so compelling is the refusal to simplify. She doesn’t say “social media is bad” or “platforms are corrupt.” Instead, she traces how visibility is often conditional. That you can break through and still be precarious. That being amplified doesn’t always mean being supported. And that even when we feel like we’re participating in something fair and open, we’re often swimming in waters shaped by someone else’s tide.

Tufekci’s insights map directly onto the discomfort many creators are expressing now. It’s not just about individual celebrities or who’s on the front page of Substack. It’s about a shift in what the platform is perceived to value, and what that means for those who don’t or can’t play the same game.

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As Collette Philip shared with me on my podcast, conversations about identity, power and equity need to go deeper than the surface. We often treat racism or systemic bias as if it's a shark, something rare and dangerous we might spot and avoid. But as she puts it, “White supremacy is not a shark, it’s the water.”

That line has stayed with me. Because what she’s saying is this: the system isn’t occasionally hostile, it’s continuously shaping what’s possible. We’re not just encountering unfairness, we’re swimming in it. Even well-intentioned spaces, even communities designed to include, are still operating within these broader currents. And if we don’t name that, we risk blaming individuals for dynamics that are structural.

So this is nostalgic, it feels urgent to write as so much is now, just memory, as it should be. But, the social bit is as relevant today as it was back then, it’s about the systems underneath. The way people and platforms shape belonging, the way identity gets negotiated and renegotiated in spaces that claim to be neutral but never are, and how unequal power is the problem.

As a psychologist, I see the patterns.
As someone who’s lived them, I know how much it can ache.

So if you’re feeling unsettled right now, noticed or overlooked, inspired or wary, know that you’re not imagining it. There’s something real being triggered here and psychology reminds us that power lives in perception as much as position, in who gets to speak, who is remembered, and who gets forgotten.

I’ve learned, through spaces I’ve loved and lost, that once something has existed, it can be erased (if we let it) but maybe that’s not always a tragedy, that’s how transformation works and the shift in our spaces, even the painful ones, are the signs that we’re growing, and naming that? instead of blaming folk is a great place to start.

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References

Ainge, L., & Newman, K. (2022). “There's no comparison”: The experiences of women entrepreneurs with Imposter Phenomenon in online communities [Research poster]. ResearchGate. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.20875.98089

Litt, E., & Hargittai, E. (2016). The imagined audience on social network sites. Social Media + Society, 2(1), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116633482

Mills, B., & Marshall, L. (2024). The Glass Bar and Euston Road (Copy edited by All Things Words & B. Campkin). UCL The Bartlett. Retrieved May 1, 2025, from https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/sites/bartlett/files/6_the_glass_bar_and_euston_road_final.pdf

Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 33–47). Brooks/Cole.

Tufekci, Z. (2013). “Not This One”: Social movements, the attention economy, and microcelebrity networked activism. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(7), 848–870. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764213479369

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