A certain kind of permission is given to live differently, to conceptualize and to act according to a new conceptualization.

Sometimes there are ways to minimize the importance of gender in life, or to confuse gender categories so that they no longer have descriptive power. But other times gender can be very important to us, and some people really love the gender that they have claimed for themselves.

No matter whether one feels one's gendered and sexed reality to be firmly fixed or less so, every person should have the right to determine the legal and linguistic terms of their embodied lives. So whether one wants to be free to live out a "hard-wired" sense of sex or a more fluid sense of gender, is less important than the right to be free to live it out, without discrimination, harassment, injury, pathologization or criminalization - and with full institutional and community support.

Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something.

I was off to Yale to be a lesbian

Gender is not something that one is, it is something one does, an act… a doing rather than a being.

Indeed it may be only by risking the incoherence of identity that connection is possible.