@violin Honestly, it always saddens me when I hear (or read) people saying they want to write a certain kind of character but are terrified of getting them wrong- in my experience it is precisely the sort of people who have these kinds of misgivings that also take the most care with the subject matter.
Of course there's something to be said for drawing from personal experience from one's writing, but- as sappy as this probably sounds- let's not forget we're all one species. The idea that a person "couldn't possibly understand" something outside the range of their identity and therefore should "stay in their own lane" always seemed deeply misguided to me. I don't identify with every transgender writer's account of transgender characters just because we share the identity of being "transgender". It's the writers who write their character as people first and everything else second that always rang true to me, regardless of whether or not they share the character's various "identities" (and identity is such a complicated thing anyway- it's almost impossible to define concretely...no matter how you try, there will always either be someone who proves the exception, or the definition becomes so broad that literally anyone can belong to it- at which point, why bother using the term at all? But that's probably a topic for a whole book of essays...)
I think a good anecdote on this topic is the heated debate that surrounded the movie "The Colour Purple" when it first came out. These days many more people call this movie and the book that inspired it "revolutionary" and "a classic". It still has its critics of course. But the moral of the story is that even so-called "own voices" stories get criticized on all sides- all because one person dared to show one facet of an experience that we rarely see in print or on television (or in a webcomic, as it were...). If only we could just let creators willing to take that risk breathe...if only the same people who want to write about experiences more rarely explored and truly give them the attention they deserve weren't terrified into silence and self-censorship...what a kaleidoscope of stories we might have then!
Anyway, sorry about the little rant haha...I guess I feel passionately about this kind of thing.