Letters: beauty and desire can lie in unexpected places | Sexuality

As a transgender man or woman who spends a ton of time looking for the thoughts of other trans persons and activists, I consider a greater part of trans individuals, which includes myself, concur that no one really should ever really feel pressured into dating another person, and that possessing a genital desire is not transphobic (“If a lesbian only wants same-intercourse dates which is not bigotry, it is her right”, Remark). Having said that, I do think there is room for reasonable discussion when a cisgender particular person declares that they simply do not locate any trans men and women attractive.

When it’s doable for trans individuals to be assumed cis, to insist that you do not discover trans individuals appealing is to imply that it’s doable to promptly notify who is trans and who isn’t, and this is consistently proved fake. It suggests there is yet another explanation at the rear of the declaration, whether that be a completely valid genital choice (with the vital assumptions about trans people’s genitals that entails), or that they feel they are “still men” or “still women”. The idea that a trans man or woman is “still just a girl/man” is evidently not acceptance of their identity, and transphobic.
Alex Winter
Selly Oak, Birmingham

Sonia Sodha is to be congratulated for her very clear-eyed investigation of what is in some respects a complex concern but which nonetheless revolves about 1 easy point: do lesbian ladies have the suitable to pick other lesbian women of all ages as their preferred sexual companions?

As a lesbian in her 70s, who has been with the similar husband or wife for around 40 decades, I come across the discussion on lesbians who want only to have sexual relations with other biologically born gals bewildering. Trans girls have picked out to live as ladies, which is their choice, but this ought to not be connected to the actuality that quite a few lesbians would not take into account them as likely sexual partners. From the point of see of trans ladies, the difficulty is much more complex, as Sonia Soda’s article clarifies, but the query remains: why simply cannot lesbians be allowed to select other lesbians?
Ellen Kelly
Edinburgh

I am a lesbian and agree with Sodha that no a single must be pressured to have sex with any person from their wishes. I am sceptical that a lot of persons assume if not, and obtain it curious that her evidence for the prominence of the watch is the estimate from Stonewall’s main government that “sexuality is personal… but if, when courting, you are crafting off total groups like folks of colour or trans men and women, it is truly worth considering how societal prejudices may perhaps have formed your attraction”.

This is not coercive but invites men and women to mirror on their tastes. As Amia Srinivasan reported in her essay ‘“Does any individual have the suitable to sexual intercourse?”, sexual intercourse and sexuality are inescapably political, and individuals with ability are likely to set the expectations for beauty and attractiveness. What can we do about this injustice, offered the wrongness of pressuring everyone to adjust their sexual preferences? At a societal amount, the noticeable response is illustration: of additional forms of man or woman and much more kinds of overall body as gorgeous and sexually attractive. We may perhaps obtain beauty and want in unpredicted places, which would be a beneficial end result for all associated.
Zoe Walker
Cambridge

Gasoline for thought

I marvel how the air pollution triggered by wooden burning compares with that prompted by the manufacturing, distribution and usage of gasoline that could be utilised to offer the very same warmth (“Lifestyle selection or urban air polluter? Citizen researchers make case versus wood burner”, Information)? Most of the wooden I have burned has occur from trees in my backyard garden, sawn partly by hand, split with a maul, transported in a wheelbarrow to my property and seasoned. In contrast, the warmth it provides would have had to appear from oil extracted underground, transported several thousand miles, refined and driven to my dwelling.
Maurice Waite
Appleton, Abingdon, Oxfordshire

Beware the BJP tiger

The Conservatives are riding a tiger, but it seems they are unaware of the character of the beast, or also taken in by the landscapes to care about what occurs when the journey comes an conclude (“Tory devotion to ‘dear friend’ Modi claims so a lot about needy write-up-Brexit Britain”, Comment). By the time the tiger turns on them, the rot of communal hatred will have spread much too deep in the United kingdom.

The Hindu-Muslim divide has been nurtured by politicians of all stripes but the Tories’ desperate need to cultivate the BJP has led it to turning a blind eye to the degradation of democracy in India. Just as Indians have managed to import their caste prejudices and – in some areas of the United kingdom – gender inequality that most of India remaining driving in the 1940s and 50s, the diaspora will see this government’s tacit approval of the BJP’s communal politics as an invitation to replicate these divisions in this country. Divide and rule was meant to make India less complicated to govern. It could close up building sections of Britain a challenge to govern.

Brexit Britain demands a trade deal that is really worth much more than the paper it is signed on. It can sign a offer with an India that is slipping down all indices of democracy as the Modi federal government techniques up its Hindutva agenda for the 2024 election, but it’s most likely that India is going to be additional inward looking, a lot less assured and most likely considerably less prosperous. The Tories have usually been the social gathering that have claimed to “get” trade and economics. Certainly they can see this?
Priyanjali Malik
London NW6

Empire condition of mind

I was delighted to study that Abdulrazak Gurnah “suspects the British empire is however critical and may well have played a element in the Brexit vote” (“Memory of empire experienced a role in Brexit, says Nobel laureate”, Information). But this is scarcely information. “We made use of to run the major empire the world has at any time noticed,” boasted Boris Johnson in February 2016. “Are we truly unable to do trade specials?”

Gurnah mentioned that “there were being packing containers and boxes of files, held somewhere in the place, which had been the archives from a variety of colonies”. Hardly news possibly. The existence of “migrated files” from the colonies at Han slope Park, Buckinghamshire, was exposed just about 10 decades in the past. Hardly information then, besides that the British are still a lengthy way from coming to conditions with their colonial earlier and its legacy.
Robert Gildea
Oxford

Crimson, white and queue

Although I concur with Rachel Cooke in applauding the White and Purple Rose commemorative markers on the M62, I dispute the point that cars and trucks “whizz past” mentioned markers (Notebook, Remark). The congestion on the M62 is routinely dreadful 5mph past the markers would much more usually be real looking. Even the stupendous check out doesn’t make up for the aggravation.
Caroline Hinchliffe
Leeds