 Butler now seeks to find a balance between the demand for autonomy (required by a democratizing ideal to which she explicitly subscribes) and the fact that such autonomy does not flow from an atomistic self, but rather its grounding in the particular ideologies and institutions which necessarily connect us with others and deny certain individuals the status of human (37–9, 223–7). Her demand, then, is to distinguish norms which foreclose the possibility of livable lives for those rendered marginal, and those which open up possibilities “to live and breathe and move”(2004, 8, 31,219). In this way, she aims to offer a more nuanced approach to the importance of identity in democratic politics, explicitly taking up a “tension that arises between queer theory and both intersex and transsexual activism” which “centers on the question of sex assignment and the desirability of identity categories” (7). Effectively, then, Butler recognizes that insofar as queer theory aims to undermine the “illusion” of stable identities while arguing against the viability of a politics based upon identity categories, it is in opposition to intersex and transsexual activism both of which are centered upon identities (i.e., intersex identity and transsexual identity). Conceding some ground, Butler recognizes that a livable life “does require various degrees of stability” (8). Her earlier work found subversion only in the disruption of stable identity. She recognizes here, however, that without some stability, life is not livable.