I found Mary Anne case’s critiques of Francis’ concern at the “gender agenda” (10 September) strained and unpersuasive.

She claims, over many paragraphs, that the notion of complementarity is a dubious modern invention with no Gospel foundation; yet while the notion is contemporary, surely “Man and Woman he made them” in Genesis is the basis for it, and what Jesus says about God binding men and women together hardly contradicts it?

Complementarity has arisen in response to a contemporary iteration of Gnosticism that claims that sex is a construct, or irrelevant; the concept did not exist before, because the ideology to which it is responding is unthinkable in past ages.