There's a thing we on the left often do which I call 'victim burdening'. It's where we insist that all anti-abuse works be made by the victims of that abuse. So anti-sexist games must be made by women, anti-racist games by BAME people, anti-homophobic games by LGBT people.

It's very similar to victim blaming, except instead of "Received abuse? It's your fault, no one else's.", we say "Received abuse? It's your responsibility to fight it, no one else's."

Now, we don't say this directly. But what we *do* say is:
A: Anyone who has not experienced this abuse should not make art against it, and
B: Art against this abuse MUST be made, it is IMPORTANT.

As you can see, this boils down to 'victim burdening'. The problem is in premise A.

But really, the issue is that not all relevant experience of abuse is on the receiving end. Sometimes, it's as a witness, or as a perpetrator.

A former misogynist who has since educated themselves on feminism can have equally insightful, but very different, things to say than a woman who has experienced gendered abuse.

And after all, if a work is anti-abuse, one of its goals may be to challenge and change people who hold abusive views. Let's make this concrete: A racist is unlikely to engage fully with the works of a BAME creator. They don't want to hear it.

I can attest to this personally. In 2007, aged about 15, I was a massive racist. I was a very mentally unwell teenager, and my brain had been further warped by 4chan, Xbox Live, and Midland English life. Beyond that, I was sexist, homophobic, and into eugenics.

Unsurprisingly, I was not walked back from that brink by the works of those I hated. It was the works of people with whom I (at least believed I) shared an identity. I watched American History X because of its cult status and because I was drawn to the promise of its violence.

American History X had a profound effect on me. It didn't 'cure' my racism, but it dealt it a blow that would open me up to other works, and eventually, much further down the line, to anti-racist works by BAME people.

Looking at other people with similarly troubled backgrounds, this is something that's incredibly common. The first big tipping points come from people they identify with. Again, I don't think this should be surprising.

Unlike Edward Norton's nazi in AHX, regular radicalised people aren't forced into a close proximity with their 'other' which causes them to drop the hate. They are slowly pulled back, one step at a time, by people with whom they have shared experience.

And so 'victim burdening' is not only a problem in terms of fairness, but also it actively prevents works being created which fill the gap between highly bigoted people and their recovery. Victim burdening actively works against the goal.