Race and class are rendered distinct analytically only to produce the realization that the analysis of the one cannot proceed without the other. A different dynamic it seems to me is at work in the critique of new sexuality studies.

Surgical intervention can be precisely what a trans person needs - it is also not always what a trans person needs. Either way, one should be free to determine the course of one's gendered life.

If you speak [ about violence against Israelis], you are in an unspeakable place, have become a Nazi or its moral equivalent (if there is a moral equivalent). It certainly terrifies, but perhaps also it is a linguistic permutation of state terrorism, an assault that stops one in one's tracks, and secures the continuing operation of the regime and its monopoly on politically intelligible speech.

The problem with Antigone is that she stood up to the despot Creon, but in such a way that she ended up dying. So she bought her defiance with her death. The real question I ended up asking was, "What would it mean for Antigone to have stood up to Creon and lived?" And the only way she could have lived is if she had had a serious social movement with her. If she arrived with a social movement to take down the despot, maybe it would have taken 18 days only, like in Egypt. It's really important to be able to re-situate one's rage and destitution in the context of a social movement.

The real question is how do you survive at the same time you pose those risks? Because you need to survive. And it seems to me that you survive in community or in solidarity, with others who are taking the risk with you.

Masculine and feminine roles are not biologically fixed but socially constructed.

I never did like the assertion of the "innate" inferiority or women or Blacks, and I understood that when people tried to talk that way, they were trying to "fix" a social reality into a natural necessity. And yet, sometimes we do need a language that refers to a basic, fundamental, enduring, and necessary dimension of who we are, and the sense of sexed embodiment can be precisely that.