Sensitivity Readers Aren't a Rubber Stamp
In the final piece in the Writing Across Difference series: the purpose of a sensitivity reader
The question of whether to use a sensitivity reader seems to have largely fallen out of the discourse, or at least grown quieter in the writing circles I inhabit. Maybe the moral panic has shifted to AI. Maybe the topic has simply lost the cultural traction it had a few years ago. Maybe it’s tangled up with the broader rollback of DEI practices across the country. Whatever the cause, to me—and I suspect to many writers—it’s still important, and more nuanced than it’s often treated.
A sensitivity reader, if you don’t know, is a professional hired by an author or publisher to check a manuscript for factual errors, worn-out tropes, and false notes tied to a specific community or experience. There’s real value in having those informed eyes on your manuscript.
Sometimes, though, a sensitivity read gets used as a kind of “don’t cancel me” insurance: proof to wave around if someone objects, or a shortcut past the harder labor of research and self-examination this series has already covered. Both uses miss the point and are more a product of fear than a committed effort to improve your craft.
The key is to hire for relevant expertise, not identity alone. Belonging to a group doesn’t automatically qualify someone to evaluate a manuscript about that group, any more than being gay makes me an expert on every gay experience. If you’re writing about a specific era, region, or subculture, look for a reader who knows that territory, not merely the broader identity category it falls under. Hire someone whose lived experience, professional knowledge, or sustained study equips them to evaluate the particular territory your manuscript enters. The goal is accuracy, not the performance of a righteous moral gesture; it’s about substance, not optics. (How I hate the word optics!)
Timing matters too. A full sensitivity read usually works best on a manuscript you’ve already drafted and revised, after you’ve made your hard choices and addressed the problems you already recognize. Send it too early, and they end up doing the homework you should have done yourself, catching things you could have caught on your own with more research or a closer read of your own pages.
Once you’ve found the right reader at the right stage, treat their notes for what they are: one informed perspective, not a ruling handed down by an entire community. No single reader speaks for every member of a group, any more than I speak for every gay man raised in Appalachia. Two readers from the same background can flag different problems in the same manuscript, or disagree with each other entirely. That’s not a weakness in the process. It’s what happens when you ask people who share one trait, and otherwise lead very different lives, to weigh in on the same pages.
Which means the work described in my second article in this series, Research Starts With You, doesn’t end once a professional signs on. You still have to know what you brought to the page before anyone else reads it: your assumptions, your blind spots, the version of a community you inherited long before you sat down to write it. A sensitivity reader can flag the line of dialogue that sounds plausible to an outsider but wrong to anyone who actually knows the territory. They can catch a trope you didn’t realize you were repeating. What they can’t do is the internal accounting that got you to the page in the first place. That work stays yours, no matter who you hire.
Also, they can be wrong. I once had a sensitivity reader ask me to replace “commit suicide” with “unalive themselves” in a novel set in the 1950s. Just no. Whatever one thinks of current terminology, “unalive themselves” is completely anachronistic in that setting.
Eventually, you should trust your own judgment. That might sound like it undercuts everything I’ve said about research and expert feedback, but it doesn’t. Research and feedback are how you earn the right to trust yourself. You do the internal and external work. You build the character with the specificity I wrote about last time. You bring in outside eyes once there’s a finished draft worth their attention. Then the decisions belong to you. A sensitivity reader isn’t a co-author. They tell you what they see. What you do with it is on you—and sometimes your publisher, if they insist. I’ve been lucky not to have had this experience, but I’ve heard stories …
However, using a sensitivity reader to end an argument instead of inform one isn’t right; it’s a deferral of responsibility. A writer gets pushback on a character, and the response is some version of, “My sensitivity reader is gay, and he said I nailed it, so your criticism doesn’t hold.” It doesn’t work that way. One reader’s approval isn’t a verdict issued on behalf of an entire community, and it doesn’t close the conversation for good. If someone else raises a concern later, from inside that community or outside it, the receipt from your sensitivity reader isn’t a reason to stop listening. It’s a chance for dialogue, and you should be open to it, if, in fact, it’s a dialogue and not a social media shouting match.
The obligation to hire one also scales with reach. A writer with a six-figure advance and a national platform has the money and the responsibility to pay for expert review, because a mistake at that scale reaches a lot of people. A debut author publishing with a small press, covering their own copyediting out of pocket, is working with a different set of constraints, and that difference deserves grace. I still think a sensitivity read is worth pursuing when it’s within reach and when you are doing something far outside your experience. Yes, money buys an added safeguard, which is a privilege—a privilege other writers do not always have.
That’s the last practical piece of this series and a fitting place to end it. I opened by arguing that writing across difference isn’t a special category of risk but simply fiction writing done with care and compassion—and that takes work. Since then, we’ve traced where that work begins: inward, before it ever reaches a library or an interview. We’ve discussed identifying the dominant story a character type carries so that it can be challenged and complicated rather than lazily repeated. We’ve looked at how specific, accumulated details make a character come alive in all their complexity. Hiring a sensitivity reader is the final stage of that process, if you can afford it—not a replacement for any part of it.
None of this eliminates the risk of writing across difference, but frankly, I don’t want to read writing that takes no risks. The gesture of compassion such writing embodies is worth it. Safe writing feels sealed off, airless as a bell jar. It’s boring—or at least it bores me. In our world, especially as it is now, compassion feels radical and dialogue revolutionary. To be a writer of any merit, you must be willing to take the risk, get it wrong, and discuss it honestly. All great art involves risk. If you succeed, wonderful. That’s something to celebrate. If you fail, listen to the feedback, own your mistakes, and grow.
For additional context, you can read the four earlier pieces in this series: “Writing Across Difference Is Just Writing Well,” “Research Starts With You,” “Question the Story You Know,” and “How Details Defeat Stereotypes.”
A writer, like any character worth building, isn’t one fixed thing. You’ll sometimes get a character wrong—even a real person, even yourself—and the work is to revise rather than defend, to change your mind, and, at times, even to embrace contradiction. That willingness brings me back to the closing sections of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:
The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.
Who has done his day’s work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?
Whitman isn’t posing certainty in these lines. He’s exposed, admitting to contradiction, waiting on the door-slab, asking a stranger to confide in him before he runs out of time. That’s the posture writing across difference asks for too. You don’t arrive certain. You show up aware of your own limits, your own contradictions, and you reach toward the reader anyway, hoping they’ll walk with you a while.
Hall of Mirrors Is Number One—and in Extraordinary Company!
Hall of Mirrors is number one on this incredible list of historical mysteries and thrillers, alongside friends Karen Odden, Cheryl Head, and Mariah Fredericks—and absolute luminaries like Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje.
Who knows what “number one” really means on a list with Atwood, but I’m just thrilled to be included, thrilled that Hall of Mirrors is still getting press, and hopeful that it will find new readers.
I’m so proud of this book—and of its sequel, the third and final novel in the Nightingale Trilogy, Goddess of Love, which arrives next March. I’d love for you to preorder it! Preorders help enormously, especially during these uncertain times in publishing.
