With a little more sleep I've decided maybe it's worth explaining my views a little more clearly for @OldCrone and anyone else who wants to know. Sorry for being snappy last night, I've just been absolutely flamed on Mumsnet before in very personal ways so I try to limit what I say and how much I debate.
Point number one, is that nobody from the university has used the phrase "explicit ban on heterosexuals". That was said by Simon Thompson of Accomodation for Students, who as far as I know doesn't have anything to do with the university and also makes some fairly problematic statements about international students in the article. So maybe we can put Thompson aside for now.
How I can see this working in practice is that students will self-select whether they want to live there, so LGBT people who think they would feel safer living with other LGBT folk will opt in, and it's pretty unlikely that anyone else will. If weird men want to get kicks off lesbian action, they'll either watch porn, or make friends with the lesbians from the LGBT flat in literally any other area of the university. I dont think it's a specific problem to this set up. Therefore, I, like Stonewall, think it's a good idea to offer something that will make people feel safer, but that wider work on social acceptance still needs to be done. For instance, if you were bi and went to this accommodation, you might have biphobia from other gay people, and that's not okay. But you'd still be allowed to live there, because as far as I can see the uni doesn't have any plans to police it.
@OldCrone regarding sex and gender. The main thing I disagree with here is that gender encompasses gender stereotypes and gender roles and should thus be abolished. Gender (you're a man/you're a woman) came slightly before all of that negative stuff was established, and isn't actually related at all to "you must wash dishes" and "you must kill mammoths". Stereotypes and gender roles are made up bullshit and we should get rid of them. But gender itself, although made up, isn't bullshit. Its just a descriptive category that some people like and find a sense of common identity and even a sense of worth and empowerment through. That's fine, surely? I really like being a woman. If we got rid of gender, we'd all be genderless, and although I'd be the same person, I wouldn't be able to say "I'm a woman", which is something that makes me happy. Claiming that gender identity doesn't mean that I want to fit into the gender role/stereotype, they're different things. I think this view is popular among my echo chamber, but I haven't seen this point being made a lot on Mumsnet, that's the basis for my earlier comments.
By less rigid I mean that I often see on here the idea that sex (vagina/penis) directly determines your gender (male/female) which I think is becoming less and less accepted, and more "fluid", less categorizable understandings of gender are being thought up. Hope that makes sense and answers everything, and that I haven't derailed the thread too much.