Originally a comment by Der Durchwanderer on To scour the text.

And, of course, it often doesn’t even work. Sensitivity readers are self-selected (if not to say self-identified), claiming to speak for a particular group or so-called lived experience. Yet nobody (but nobody!) can realistically claim to account for every perspective within a group or class of people who share similar life experiences, and so anyone claiming to offer this is selling a bill of goods.

All too often, despite having engaged one or more of these charlatans, a work is still held up for a roasting by professional rivals or overenthusiastic “fans” who’ve attempted to fill the void of meaning in their lives with obsessive policing of other people’s creative output. Such heresy hunts are especially common in YA Twitter (which is to say among any author who wants to publish in YA at all). Occasionally a foment will rise so high that an agent will throw an author under the bus, as I believe B&W has already covered.

This is wokeness moral panic in a nutshell; insisting that everyone engage in a certain action and, at the same time, insisting that this action has no actual power, either in intent or in effect. It is in the same epiphenomenon class as a religion insisting that God made each individual human special, and that every human is a wretched sinner. The carrot and the stick, wrapped in one, with the only true answer being to give ever more power to the priests and priest-aspirants.