“... my maternal grandfather, whose name was Mendel Seidel, that all Americans were named Brown, Smith or Jones, so he told the immigration officer at Ellis Island that his name was Mendel Brown. Perhaps these surnames did not really mean very much to him: he presumably thought of himself as Mendel ben Avraham. In the same vein, my paternal grandfather ...”

“... transsexuality is an infinite confusion of tongues. Neither of them is arriving anywhere. For Jay Prosser by contrast, the transsexual man or woman is enfolded in their new body like a second skin (his 1998 book, one of the most widely circulated and debated on the topic, has the title Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality). As he describes ...”