I know that some subjective experiences of sex are very firm and fundamental, even unchangeable. They can be so firm and unchanging that we call them "innate". But given that we report on such a sense of self within a social world, a world in which we are trying to use language to express what we feel, it is unclear what language does that most effectively. I understand that "innate" is a word that conveys the sense of something hired-wired and constitutive. I suppose I would be inclined to wonder whether other vocabularies might do the job equally well.

Not all bodies are born in male or female. There is a continuum of bodies and it seems to me that trying to persuade medical and psychiatrist establishments to deal with the intersex involves critique of the binary gender system. Similarly there continues to be extreme, sometimes very extreme violence against transgender people.

One struggles always with these norms. So one doesn't construct oneself freely without respect to norm but one works with one's historical situation and sees where there might be some play. Where there might be some freedom to move.

Gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original; in fact, it is a kind of imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself.

We need a legal and political understanding of the right of the refugee, whereby no solution for one group produces a new class of refugees - you can't solve a refugee problem by producing a new, potentially greater refugee problem.

I am sorry to be so blunt, but I do not see much ambiguity here. [Barack] Obama was late to affirm the Egyptian revolution as a democratic movement, and even then he was eager to have installed those military leaders who were known for their practices of torture. And now he is quick to make allies with the Muslim Brotherhood for tactical reasons as well (though earlier that same administration stoked Islamophobic fear about that very political party).

You only trust those who are absolutely like yourself, those who have signed a pledge of allegiance to this particular identity.