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.

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

It seems to me that responsiveness is a better source for understanding what moral claims are and how they work upon us.

We have to be able track the ways in which fear, for instance, is monopolized by state and media institutions, ways in which fear is actually promoted and distributed as a way of bolstering the need for greater security and militarization.

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 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.

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).