A couple years ago I wrote a post arguing that we should not be defined by biological categories. I stand by that post today. It focused on transgender (and did so before I came out as gender-fluid myself), but it also mentioned race: “I view the struggle for racial equality in the light of this ideal as well, as Prince Ea does: skin colour or related phenotypical characteristics should not define who we really are.”

Anyone who read that post could have come up with the reasonable question: well then, must you not also believe that we should allow transracialism alongside transgender? That people should be allowed to define their own race just as they define their own gender?

At the time I wrote the first post I would have refused to answer that question – for reasons that came down, in a word, to fear. I saw what happened to Rebecca Tuvel, who defended the idea of transracialism in a philosophy journal (Hypatia, the leading journal of feminist philosophy). After a smear campaign on Facebook and Twitter where Tuvel was accused of doing “violence”, more than 800 people signed an open letter demanding that the journal retract the article and publicly proclaim that publishing it was a “failure of judgement”. An associate editor immediately published an apology for publishing the article, followed by a spate of resignations that ultimately took the journal’s entire editorial staff.