Apropos Paris Lees: At last, a passport to the post-gender (!) era (Opinion, 7 January) – my exclamation mark. Sex has its problems, granted. But the business of it, and the presence of it – gender – accounts for a huge proportion of the texture of daily life, and of what makes life worth living. It’s the engine that keeps running, from early childhood to considerable old age: motivating, focusing, keeping us alert and aware; and saving us – this above all – from the intolerable condition of having to live our lives as concept, and by mere ideas, if there were no such thing as unmediated gender drives to keep us all alive.
If that “little M or F on your passport” doesn’t matter, then why does it matter? The shallow arrogance behind Paris Lees’ drab parade of safely fashionable notions – which (however) unthinkingly brush aside core elements not only of our “immediate” (mere centuries-old) culture, but of thousands of years of evolved human experience – is worryingly typical (along with the attendant casual subversion of our language itself) of current trends in female gender-politicking. No sex please, indeed. This is politics.
Phillip Goodall
Norwich
• As well as gender on passports, let’s get rid of “titles”. Whenever I have to fill out a form on the internet, it asks for a “title”. This states therefore my gender and my marital status, but not for men of course, who have no option to state that they are married.
Perhaps we need a campaign of civil disobedience where we all give ourselves a male peerage from that list of drop-down options?
Moira Sykes
Manchester
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