A coup and protesters killed in Myanmar. A diplomatic spat between the United States and Iran over resuming nuclear talks. Questions about the effectiveness and fairness of Covid-19 vaccines and their worldwide distributions … But, last week, one of the biggest news stories was Mr and Mrs Potato Head. Or rather, it’s Potato Head for the popular toy from now on, as producer Hasbro seeks to rebrand it to be gender-neutral. Mind you, they are not forcing them to undergo a sex reassignment surgery, as some early social-conservative critics had feared. The formerly Mr Potato Head gets to keep his moustache, and the ex-Mrs will still wear lipsticks, at least for now. It’s just a name change, not a sex change. Crisis averted. Or, so it seems. But people seem to be genuinely agitated in the English-speaking world – angry about the change if you are a social conservative; angrier because it didn’t go far enough, if you are an advocate of gender equality and neutrality. Ben Shapiro, one of America’s most influential conservative commentators, tweeted: “Mrs. Potato Head has also been killed off. She will be replaced by an asexual can of Pringles.” He jumped the gun. Well, so did everyone. But the triggering is understandable. Japanese man adopts wife’s name in bid to challenge nation’s sexism In recent years, a fierce war over gender identification is being waged in many Western countries, so much so that you cannot understand their domestic politics without getting to grips with the ever expanding nomenclature of gender politics. Whatever you think about them, young people in Hong Kong fight fiercely – or destructively – for democracy and autonomy; their counterparts in the West are triggered by societal injustice over binary sexual labels (male/female) being forced on them. Call me old-fashioned but for much of my life – I am 55 – I only had to deal with the concept of two sexes, and homosexuals and lesbians. That was it. I wish life were so simple for my two teenage children. I feel sorry for them, who have to deal with a much greater variety of genders. The number of genders is constantly growing. Sex is already confusing when you are a teenager. I can’t imagine what it must be like for young people nowadays. How are they to learn to develop intimate relationships with so many different genders? To seek enlightenment, I look up something like healthline.com, which helpfully suggests “64 Terms That Describe Gender Identity and Expression”. I gave up quickly. To check up a more authoritative source, I referred to Cosmopolitan , which cuts the vocabulary down to a more manageable size – just 12. I would recommend becoming grammatically comfortable with at least the following: agender, cisgender, cishet, transgender, genderqueer, non-binary and intersex. If you don’t know their meanings already, you can easily Google them. For a while, when I read some Canadian and American news sites, I was confused by the reporter who referred to a suspect, for example, as “they”. Was it a typo because there was more than one suspect? China’s transgender people too scared to come out like Elliot Page No, they are correcting the gender deficiency of the English language. He, she, his and her are increasingly being phased out in many publications; better get used to it. Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, first came to public prominence several years ago because he refused to accept the language changes, including a Canadian human rights law that prohibits discrimination based on gender identity or expression. It doesn’t really bother me. Socially, I am fairly liberal and accepting of new norms. So I am at a loss why so many people get all worked up over them, one way or another. If some people sexually identify themselves in categories outside of traditional gender grammar and demand to be addressed as such, who am I to object? After all, I demand that you call me Alex and not Peter, Lo and not Chan. A former boss of ours recently decided on a sex change. None of us in the office thought it was a big deal. Now that’s social progress.