SENSITIVITY READERS ARE THE NEW LITERARY GATEKEEPERS:
In theory, sensitivity readers were a way to write outside your identity without causing offense by “getting it wrong.” But the emerging consensus, especially in Y.A., was that it was even more wrong to stray outside your lane in the first place. In a particularly revealing 2018 feature on the culture website Vulture, a sought-after sensitivity reader expressed profound contempt for the authors whose manuscripts she was paid to vet.
“These writers think they’re doing the world a service. Like, ‘Look at me, I’m showing up for the social-justice movement.’ But the problem is that they’re showing up and they’re taking a seat,” she said.
The implications were clear: If you were a white author writing black characters, you were taking up space that could have gone to a more deserving marginalized writer. If you needed a sensitivity reader, then was this really your story to tell?
These questions don’t serve as a deterrent for everyone. In the intervening years, sensitivity readers have become de rigueur—in young adult fiction, but also, increasingly, in work for adults. Sometimes a publisher will insist on this extra step; sometimes, a conscientious writer will seek it out on his own. The prevalence of the practice is more sensed than studied—there’s no data on what percentage of books go through this sort of vetting—and it’s highly variable depending on the writer’s own genre and community; the ultra-woke author of prestigious literary fiction is a lot more likely to request or receive a sensitivity read than, say, a hard-boiled crime novelist.
Those who put stock in sensitivity reads seem to mostly imagine that the practice offers a form of insurance, preempting allegations of this -ism or that -phobia, although it rarely pans out that way.
When The Men, Sandra Newman’s sci-fi novel in which everyone with a Y chromosome suddenly vanishes from the face of the earth, came under fire for what critics termed the “transphobic” implication that people with Y chromosomes are men, one of the chief questions was whether the author had engaged a trans sensitivity reader. But when Newman said that yes, she had, the outrage only multiplied. Why had she hired only one sensitivity reader? Did she think this was an excuse?
“That only makes it WORSE,” one commenter wrote, “because you’re claiming you KNOWINGLY did this.”
Indeed, not even the professionally sensitive are safe when a cancellation comes calling. In 2019, sensitivity reader Kosoko Jackson frantically pulled his own Y.A. debut novel after he was called out for setting a gay romance against the backdrop of the Kosovo War. (As is typical of these controversies, it’s hard to parse exactly what Jackson did wrong, but the complaints mainly focused on the offense of “centering” the wrong identity category—in this case, two American boys—in a story set amid a real-life tragedy that mainly affected people of another identity category.)
Related: The Social Media Mob Versus the Novelist, the new video from Reason TV:
As Ray Bradbury predicted in Fahrenheit 451, books will be burned to protect everyone’s feelings as much as to block the content within them. But I’m not sure if even he would have predicted that it would be the publishers who would be outsourcing those who manned the flamethrowers.