The Sensitivity Reader Has No Authority Over Your Imagination

Around 2018, after leaving construction and returning to school, I released a small anthology under name and was told I should use sensitivity readers. The distinction bothered me even then. A historian can correct a date, a physician can identify an impossible injury, and someone from a particular region can tell me I have given a character the wrong expression. Those are recognizable forms of expertise. What I was being offered instead was a reader whose identity qualified that person to judge whether I had represented an entire group acceptably.

Expert consultation can improve a story. It cannot grant cultural absolution, supply moral permission, or speak with the authority of a people. Writers remain responsible for what they create, and readers remain free to judge the result.

After finishing graduate school, I was recruited by several companies for writing work. One opportunity progressed through multiple conversations before I understood that the company was developing a sexually explicit mobile game. The initial assignment involved roughly fifty suggestive dialogue prompts.

As the interviews continued and the company learned that I was a married man with children, the requested work became more specific. I was expected to write explicit sexual material between men. I still remember lying in bed with my wife as we laughed over the strange direction my writing career had taken. Her judgment was immediate: “I don’t think this is what God wanted you to do.”

She was right, and I declined.

The company was free to request the material, and I was free to refuse it. Christian conscience is still conscience. A culture of sensitivity becomes incoherent when it respects certain moral boundaries while treating others as defects to be corrected.

What Consultation Is For

Writers have always consulted people who know things they do not. If I need to understand military aviation, I can call my father, a retired C-141 pilot, and ask him how it actually worked. Research is part of the craft, and refusing to correct a factual mistake is not courage.

I understood that distinction long before anyone around me used the phrase sensitivity reader. When I was young and framing houses to put myself through the University of Oklahoma, I was already writing fiction. One story raised questions about propulsion and how someone might cross enormous distances through space. I sought out a professor in Sarkeys and started asking questions because imagination did not excuse me from research.

I needed knowledge about propulsion. I did not need permission to write about young people from OU or to portray a young man having trouble in a heterosexual relationship. Expertise answers questions and corrects mistakes. It does not decide whether the writer is allowed to imagine.

What Sensitivity Readers Can and Cannot Do

The modern sensitivity reader became increasingly common in publishing during the 2010s. In 2023, The Guardian⁠ described sensitivity readers⁠ as people hired to make editorial suggestions about material that could be considered offensive, inaccurate, or stereotypical.

There is nothing sinister about receiving another opinion. The danger begins when that opinion is treated as a certificate of moral permission.

No sensitivity reader can embody an entire race, religion, sex, nation, disability, or social class. Different people with similar backgrounds can bring different experiences and judgments to the same material. Hiring several readers may broaden the range of responses, but it cannot produce a single verdict called cultural truth.

In the 2024 Publishing Research Quarterly discussion Working as a Sensitivity Reader: Just Another Step on the Way to Publication⁠, author and sensitivity reader Georgina Kamsika addresses that question directly. Sensitivity readers, she says, are “not some certification board.” They are freelancers who provide advice and have no control over whether that advice is accepted.

A sensitivity reader may possess valuable knowledge, correct a fact, explain a reaction, or identify a consequence the writer did not anticipate. The advice deserves consideration, not obedience.

Wizards and the Warning That Says Too Little

The strongest example is a published policy attached to products customers can examine for themselves.

On its official product page for The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970–1977⁠, Wizards of the Coast warns, “These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.” The same legacy-content warning appears on the DMsGuild page for Pregen Characters: Human Paladin (5e), a ready-to-play character created for the modern edition of the game. Neither warning identifies the particular passage, image, or idea that warrants it.

When the same accusation appears on a historical collection and a current character sheet without explaining what triggered it, the warning ceases to educate the customer. It becomes ritual condemnation.

Wizards still sells both. If a passage deserves condemnation, identify the passage. Otherwise, drop the warning.

The Boundary We Draw

Paladin Forge adheres to the Christian teaching that sexual intimacy belongs within marriage. For us, that means sexualized gaming, erotic role-play, fetish material, and simulated orgies do not belong at our table.

Other publishers may make different games. Other groups may run different tables. Freedom of conscience includes their freedom to choose and ours.

Chaos Gremlins and Small Examples

In Critical Role⁠ Campaign 3, Episode 28, “The Deathwish Run”⁠, guest player Erika Ishii climbed onto the studio table during a climactic character reveal. I found it rude and theatrical. It is the sort of conduct often praised as “chaos gremlin” energy. A hobby willing to apply solemn moral judgments to decades-old books should be capable of applying the much simpler standard that shared spaces deserve ordinary courtesy, regardless of who is receiving the correction.

No Inquisitions

Paladin Forge’s answer is Christian because Paladin Forge is Christian. We will draw upon Scripture, Western legend, Southern memory, and the lives we have lived. We will build settings in which good and evil are real, monsters remain monstrous, and heroic conduct means something. That is our confession and our creative inheritance.

Consultants may offer knowledge, editors may offer judgment, and readers may decide whether the result succeeds. None of them can hand the writer a certificate of moral permission.

The sensitivity reader has no authority over your imagination.