I argue that transracial is a productively disruptive concept because it can unsettle the taken-for-granted assumptions about the stability and naturalness of racial categories on which the reproduction of the racial order depends. The term also brings into focus the ways in which racial and ethnic identities have already become more fluid in recent decades. Sociologists have documented substantial shifts in racial identification from one census to the next, and from one social context to another. Ancestry, increasingly understood as mixed, has begun losing its authority over identity. And race and ethnicity, like gender, have come to be understood as something we do, not just something we have.

Of course, race is also — crucially — something others do to us, and opportunities for ethnoracial re-identification remain unequally distributed both across and within racial groups. Yet that is not a good reason for banning the term “transracial.” I was therefore deeply troubled by the attempt to shut down, rather than critically engage, Dr. Tuvel’s argument.

But the Tuvel affair raises issues that go beyond the controversial notion of transracialism. First, it invites reflection on what might be called “epistemological insiderism.” This is the belief that identity qualifies or disqualifies one from writing with legitimacy and authority about a particular topic. Few would argue directly that who we are should govern what we study. But subtler forms of epistemological insiderism are at work in the practice of assessing scholarly arguments with central reference to the identity of the author. Does the often-mentioned fact that Dr. Tuvel is white and cisgender (as am I) disqualify her from raising certain questions? Is her identity relevant to assessing her argument for according more weight to an individual’s racial self-identification and less weight to ancestry?

Epistemological insiderism not only stakes out certain domains as belonging to persons with certain identities; it also risks boxing persons with those identities into specific domains. It risks conveying the patronizing and offensive expectation that members of racial and ethnic minorities will focus their scholarship on race and ethnicity.

The attacks on Dr. Tuvel also raise troubling questions about the regulation of speech in academic settings. As claims to find speech harmful or offensive have proliferated in academia, so have debates about micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, speech codes and campus invitations to controversial outside speakers. Conservative commentators accuse universities of censorship and talk piously of academic freedom, conveniently forgetting that it is conservative state legislatures and appointed boards of governors who really threaten academic freedom at public universities, through threats to defund research and teaching activities they do not like.

Overt threats to academic freedom, like the Hungarian government’s attempt to shut down the Central European University, can be directly challenged. The more insidious danger is that of self-censorship. Will teachers avoid assigning controversial materials or discussing controversial views in class? Will professors stop exploring controversial topics in their research? The risks are much higher for those, like Dr. Tuvel, without the security of tenure. But even tenured faculty may opt to stick with safe topics. Reflecting on the Tuvel affair, the tenured feminist philosopher Chloe Taylor wondered “if I should not write or teach on certain topics that make me vulnerable to attack.”

Todd Gitlin’s devastating observation about the debilitating consequences of the left’s cultural politics — “while the right has been busy taking the White House, the left has been marching on the English department” — dates from the ’90s, but it has lost none of its pertinence. Only now the battle lines are drawn within the cultural left; the English department was conquered long ago. The spectacle of the left devouring its own children — and of emancipatory liberalism turning into its opposite — may read as farce. But in the context of the wider political emergency we face, the obsessively inward focus of the cultural left can also be understood as tragedy.