Thread by @xasymptote

I wish there was a way to go "woah hold up, this book thing is harmful, could we not, please" without immediately making every marginalized #ownvoices author panic that they'll be cancelled for vastly smaller offences than the one we are actually talking about.

But there actually isn't one at this point in time, I think, for a lot of reasons.

Like, #ownvoices authors *do* get held to a higher standard than random privileged people and held over the coals for much smaller mistakes. That's not in our imaginations.

Anyway if you are an autistic author and you are feeling this panic right now, I just want to say:

(1) big mood

(2) you are NOT the problem here, trust me

(3) I'm sorry for anything I might have done to make the feeling worse.

I wish there was more room for nuance in the way we talk about books, I really do. I wish we had unequivocal language to say "this is really harmful" but also to say "this is ambivalent" and "this does some really cool things in an imperfect way" and-

"this makes me uncomfortable but it might be valuable for someone else" and "this is valuable for me but I see why it might not be good for others" and "this is too dark for me [but in a non-judgey way]" and... on and on. I wish we had more sense of proportion?

I try to use nuance this way on Autistic Book Party. And some things don't deserve it! Some things really don't have any redeeming qualities. But there's so much else that's gray.

And there's so much, especially from #ownvoices authors, that isn't even gray so much as just *sensitive* - it reveals thoughts and experiences that are painful, it contains our own imperfection and mess, and we fear we'll be judged very harshly for it and sometimes we are.

And also, people are going to legitimately disagree about the boundaries of all of these categories, which makes it even harder.

I don't know. I believe good representation matters! But I've been in this game for a decade and the longer I watch this discourse go on the less and less I feel good about participating.

If you, strangers on Twitter, knew the depths of my own fear of Being Discovered To Be Problematic, and the bizarre things I have done in private to combat this fear, you would LAUGH. It would be genuinely ludicrous to most of you. The pressure authors feel is absurd.

And yet... some things are actually harmful! And sometimes I wanna talk about those things. So I don't feel like "never call things out" is the solution either. I don't know what the solution is. I don't KNOW.