I do think it's important that we experiment with new vocabularies. That new words help us conceptualize our social existence in a different way.

There is a rather huge ethical difference between electing surgery and being faced with transphobic condemnation and diagnoses. I would say that the greatest risk of mutilation that trans people have comes directly from transphobia.

I am not sure that I know enough about the pre-history of 9/11 to agree or disagree. But I did think at the time that the [George W.] Bush administration took a number of cues from the Israeli government, not only by drawing on and intensifying anti-Arab racism, but by insisting that the attack on US government and financial buildings was an attack on "democracy" and by invoking "security at all costs" to wage war without a clear focus (why the Taliban?), and by suspending both constitutional rights and the regular protocol for congressional approval for declaring war.

If you are asking whether states and state actors can only respond through revenge, then you are suggesting that diplomatic solutions are hopeless.

I wonder whether I might have meant "terrify us" but perhaps as well there was a less than conscious effort to show that the suppression of debate about Palestine and about the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement - within many academic circles - does seek to establish those who would address such issues in speech as already collaborating with "terrorist" regimes, although now only Hamas is officially terrorist according to the US government and its allies.

Indeed, even if one believed that criticisms of Israel are by and large heard as anti-semitic (by Jews, anti-semites, or people who could be described as neither), it would become the responsibility of all of us to change the conditions of reception so that the public might begin to distinguish between criticism of Israel and a hatred of Jews.

We should all have greater freedoms to define and pursue our lives without pathologization, de-realization, harassment, threats of violence, violence, and criminalization. I join in the struggle to realize such a world.