This article is maybe the best I’ve seen illuminating my problems with the norms in academic and activist spaces which tell us to “listen to queer voices” or not to speak on issues that we don’t have personal experience in. These norms (which Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls "deference epistemology) take the true statements that knowledge is socially situated and created from real experiences and use that to encourage passivity and stepping back from issues instead of diving in. Instead of creating solidarity, they create walls between us and conversational rules which stop us from getting anywhere.

I suggest reading the whole article, but here are a few important sections (emphasis in bold is mine):

Even in the most convenient version of the case for deference epistemology, we have to think that we’re very selectively training people to stand up to power. These are the people that we want to confront the cops, the bosses, and the military. We want them to be lions in the streets and lambs in the organizing rooms.

Maybe this works. People are capable of compartmentalizing. I don’t know. But I would never ask someone to do that. I would never ask someone to put themselves in harm’s way with me, and sometimes even for me, who I don’t trust enough to hear respectful disagreement from. I don’t understand why we have that expectation for anyone else.

I’m confident that if you had social norms where things people said — whether they were about harm or offense or trauma — were evaluated, that by itself would produce a very different social environment than deference epistemology. Because, at the end of the day, deference epistemology tells you not to evaluate certain things in certain situations. I think the potential of that for particularly egregious kinds of exploitation is obvious.

If you say, well, this person’s perspective is what we’re going with, kind of regardless of what I privately feel, I think you’re going to encourage very recognizable forms of abuse, very recognizable forms of bullying.

On activists in Flint:

They didn’t need their oppression to be “celebrated,” “centered,” or narrated in the newest academic parlance. They didn’t need someone to understand what it felt like to be poisoned. What they needed was the lead out of their water. So they got to work.

I also think about James Baldwin’s realization that the things that tormented him the most were “the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.” That I have survived abuse of various kinds, have faced near-death from both accidental circumstance and violence (different as the particulars of these may be from those around me) is not a card to play in gamified social interaction or a weapon to wield in battles over prestige. It is not what gives me a special right to speak, to evaluate, or to decide for a group. It is a concrete, experiential manifestation of the vulnerability that connects me to most of the people on this earth. It comes between me and other people not as a wall, but as a bridge.

As a personal plea: please don’t just listen to my very trans voice. Engage with it! Push back, assert your own thoughts, and think about what I say like I’m another human being, not a representative for transness. We don’t get effective thinkers or strong-willed activists by bending over to someone who is more oppressed. I want comrades, not listeners.