Whether she likes it or not, Chris Northwood is a trailblazer.
On May 5, she became Manchester’s first trans councillor, and now represents the Ancoats and Beswick ward. From what had been a neck-and-neck race between the Lib Dems and Labour, Northwood pulled away and secured her seat by 335 votes.
But the road to the Town Hall has not been smooth for the 35-year-old. There’s been a measure of strife — both politically and internally — for the new councillor.
Despite that turmoil, one thing has been a constant: Mancs have accepted her for who she is.
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“One of my ‘favourite’ moments,” she joked during a wide-ranging interview with the Manchester Evening News, “is when I was canvassing someone. He was telling me ‘you’re all a load of liars’, and this and that.
“I was trying to dislodge myself from the conversation because there was no way of making progress. If you’re on the door for too long, someone will come and check on you [while we canvass]. So Alan Good came along and asked if everything was alright.
“And he replied, ‘I’m just telling her, you’re all a bunch of s****s!’, and I thought, well he gendered me correctly, so that’s good. You have to laugh.”
That established something of a pattern for the 35-year-old Chris, who is originally from Doncaster and moved to Manchester more than a decade ago to take a job at the BBC as the corporation moved into MediaCity. She has since left that role, and now spends her weeks working part-time, and carrying out her council duties.
That pattern, she says, is one of acceptance for who she is as a person, but not always as a politician.
“We have had it on the door before where people [turn to other members of the household] and say ‘I’m just letting him know’, and when you say ‘it’s actually she’, they reply ‘oh are you trans?’ — so most people don’t really care,” Chris went on.
“If you look back, Manchester is the home of Corrie. They had a trans character on the show a very long time ago. It was just seen as something interesting about that person.
“I think Manchester is liberal, accepting place, and Ancoats and Beswick is part of that. That acceptance is cross-community, too, from nicer parts of Ancoats to the more working class Beswick.”
However, the audience’s acceptance of Corrie’s Hayley, who was played by Julie Hesmondhalgh and moved to Weatherfield in 1998, didn’t mean Chris didn’t have doubts about standing for election.
“I wasn't sure what I was getting into, and a little bit was the question of is being a local councillor the best way of making a difference to the world I can, or is going all-in on my career?” she continued.
“It’s been a big debate within me about helping individuals, or helping more people but less so. That was the battle — do I want to become a politician, or a civil servant?"
While she now holds the title of Manchester’s first trans councillor, it wasn’t ‘something I sought to have’, Chris adds. She just ‘wanted to represent my community’.
But who she represented is also a question which prompted turmoil. Initially, Chris opted to join the Labour Party.
“I originally joined the Labour Party after Corbyn got elected the first time, because I thought he represented a radical shift in what politics could be, rather than playing around the edges,” she explained. I was quite quickly disillusioned.
“For me, it was things like [promises to] nationalise water. How is that going to really tackle poverty and inequality? Or nationalising trains — the average profit on a train ticket is about three percent — it’s not going to bring trains down in price massively if you nationalise it. Three percent of a lot of train journeys is a lot of money — but it’s not going to be a radical overhaul. I was disappointed at that, so I decided to leave.”
It meant that Chris, who says her political ideology revolves around ‘small, empowered communities working together’, jumped ship to the Lib Dems.
She went on: “I had voted for the Lib Dems for most of my life, it was only Corbyn that gave me a little flirt with Labour. There is this perception of a right-left battle, and people see the Lib Dems as centrist.
Others say there’s a two-dimensional perspective, which has another [axis] going from liberal to authoritarian. Actually, when it comes to non-economic issues, that’s the spectrum I care about more.
“I care more about empowering people whereas both right and left defer to centralisation of power. The right go centralising power in monopolies, on the left it’s through state control and nationalisation. I’m [for] small, empowered communities working together, that’s where my political ideology lives.”
And from there, after jumping through the various hoops all local candidates need to in order to gain the endorsement of their party, Chris was selected, unopposed to stand in 2023. Her win — defeating incumbent Labour man Majid Dar — means that the Lib Dems now have two Ancoats and Beswick councillors, with Alan Good being the other.
The plan, broadly, is to work hard and stand up for people, she says. But whatever Chris Northwood achieves in office, she’s already made history — whether she likes it or not.
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