If I had to name the part of my role as an editor I find the most daunting, I’d probably say sensitivity editing. But I’d also name that among the most important.

For those not familiar with the term, sensitivity editing is editorial focused on making sure a work is written with care toward its audience. Particularly, making sure the work is sensitive about the dynamics of race, sex, class, and disability that might impact that audience.

Some may wonder how this could be as important as I’m saying it is—and it’s true, some authors struggle with receiving sensitivity edits. This is part of why I find it daunting. After all, shouldn’t art take primacy over political discourse, if for not other reason than an author is trying to tell a story, rather than write an essay?

This is an understandable worry because an editor’s role isn’t to impose an artistic vision on a book, but to help the author realize that vision through technique. An editor is working to help perfect your work, not make it their own.

To some, sensitivity editing can feel like just this—imposing a vision, rather than refining a vision already there. This is likely because sensitivity editing adheres to a different level of art than craft, which is the moral level. The moral elements of the story—what values the characters have, what the story stands for, and what the author believes—go deeper than craft, than writing technique, and are at the heart of the art of the story itself. So it’s not surprising that it might feel like a sensitivity editor is telling you to censor vital parts of your book.

This leads some to the impression that sensitivity editing is at best fairly superficial, spotting slurs and egregious moments—the absolute softest tissue of the story, leaving any artistic structure untouched.

But if that’s so, why is it so important?

You Art Has An Effect

Before going on, I want to talk about a TV show. The main thing to know about this show is that I watched it with my best friend.

It was during a particularly hard time in both our lives, financially and personally. My friend had introduced me to this show, and we watched it together during a sweltering summer with no air conditioning and little concrete hope about our harried, ambiguous life conditions. Frankly, the stress was putting a lot of strain on our friendship. But we watched and laughed, and it kept us together, and it gave us something to do while we sweated on the couch, and it cocooned us in joint memories that sweetened the thick summer air. Memories we still return to.

The other thing to know about this show is that it featured a trans woman character. She was depicted as a comically ugly older woman: square jaw, broad shoulders, deep voice pitched higher and acted to sound silly, often with excessive makeup, visible body hair, etc. She was also insinuated to have a taste for young boys.

She was shown as creepy, but in a funny way. Sometimes hyper masculine, voice suddenly dropping—but in a funny way. Being reacted to by men with horror, but in a funny way. Being literally buried alive as part of an extended cartoonish sight gag in order to get her out of the sight of a horde of disgusted men.

But in a funny way.

Part of what I remember most about this character was that my friend thought she was endearing and amusing. It was all in good fun. I thought the same, despite the sting underneath that agreement, the stretch of pain that didn’t seem to care whether this was in a funny way or not.

What Causes That Effect?

One purpose of art is to show things. Even—maybe especially—ugly things. Characters don’t have to be good people, and events in a story don’t have to be happy. In fact, because conflict is a vital ingredient to storytelling, some negativity is arguably necessary to writing. How can we ask that art always be affirming and uplifting when real life isn’t­—when people aren’t?

Common ways I see this expressed include:

“But my character isn’t supposed to be very PC.”

“I think it’s realistic that people would talk like that.”

“My characters don’t mean any harm, but this is the kind of thing he’d laugh at.”

“Why do my characters have to be perfect?”

Writers are all (or almost all) familiar with the idea of showing versus telling. That art is meant to depict in detail rather than merely describe in the abstract.

But there’s something else that’s important: what you don’t show.

Characters are no more perfect than creators are, and when we try to make them perfect, it usually rings very false. But we also cannot show everything about our characters, perfect or imperfect, good or bad. The value of the showing is in its specificity.

A story is defined as much by what you don’t find in it as what you do find in it. What we show is to a specific purpose, and that purpose defines the plot, theme, style, and overall impact of the book. It’s like using perspective to draw the eye in a painting, or using a certain color palette to suggest a mood. A painting with every color and no perspective wouldn’t have much specificity to it. The point of what we show is that it’s all building toward something—and that something is what the story is about.

So the question should not be “is it realistic that my character might think/say/do this?” and instead should be “does my character thinking/saying/doing this help me show what the story is about?”

This is for much the same reason that you don’t write scenes about each time your characters go to the bathroom. Why you don’t show flashbacks of every embarrassing moment in the main character’s past. Just as all gay people don’t need or want to know about all their straight friends’ past homophobia, the reader doesn’t need to know about all the imperfections of a character that don’t serve the purpose of the book. Especially if knowing them would hurt that purpose.

So this brings us to a truth that may be a little hard to swallow for many people—because what we show needs to have united meaning, any ugliness shown still needs treated with respect and intent. Ethics is part of art. And thus, it’s part of craft, too.

Art Shows Worldview—And Worldview Is Moral

You can’t hide what you believe forever. You certainly can’t hide it in your art—and why would you want to? Part of why the moral tone and worldview of a story feels sacred is because you don’t have art without it. But just as the theme, tension, or mood of a story can get confused or bogged down, so too can the worldview.

What happens then is that what the story is about risks getting lost, too.

I tried watching this show again last year, the one I’d bonded over with my friend. And you know what? It doesn’t have the same magic anymore. I didn’t finish the rewatch. I faced once again all these bits with the trans woman character that were intended as funny, not “PC,” and the part of me that didn’t find them funny—had never found them funny—just couldn’t do it this time.

What was supposed to be funny about painting her as preying on children? Is the joke at all related to how I, working retail in a small town, had rumors spread about me that I was a child stalker, because someone saw me stocking shelves around some kids?

What was supposed to be funny about her having obvious facial and body hair, as if she didn’t know how to groom? Is it related to how I worry over whether I’ll be clocked as “male” every time I’m in public or around strangers?

What was supposed to be funny about her buried in a box by a group of men so they didn’t have to look at her? Does it have to do with how often trans women are actually murdered in real life because men feel horrified by us?

Maybe it has to do with how many times I’ve wanted to be sealed in a box, safe from these invasive forces, safe from all the mocking eyes that see me as a predator, as disgusting, as a joke. But if so, it sure didn’t do anything but make that feeling worse.

What was the artistic vision behind these sequences? How are we supposed to tell?

These moments were probably the product of carelessness, which diluted and frankly ruined the artistic vision rather than adding to it. I can’t tell what the purpose of them might have been. But I can tell you one thing about them.

It didn’t teach my friend to hate trans women. He’s not a bigot. He’s been my dear friend for over twenty years, fully knowing I’m trans.

What it did teach him was something misleading—that these depictions were not harmful. He learned to see them as part of the charm of the character, something that made her funny, not something meant to humiliate any trans women watching this show. I know this because other times, when dark and mocking humor has been used to target transfeminine people, he didn’t get why it hurt me. He didn’t get what was wrong with it. When other shows, other stories, other people, talked or acted about trans women this way, he seemed caught off guard at the idea that it hurt.

And this made me ashamed to tell him that it hurts. Even though he has learned, has been a good friend, and has come to understand my point of view. Because silly as it may seem, this show was special to us. And I’m still at least a little bit ashamed to say that it doesn’t mean the same thing to me now.

We wanted to like the show because overall it was entertaining and uplifting. The effect of this humor was to make it seem like transphobic disgust is no big deal, not meant badly. So I end up seeming like the one overreacting when it is a big deal. I seem like the one with no sense of humor.

So maybe it’s strictly speaking realistic that the characters of this show really would do these things. But it didn’t serve any artistic purpose to depict that, unless the purpose was malice.

When all else is stripped away, art is communication—and to communicate you need to connect. You need to make sure what your story is about comes through. Otherwise you alienate rather than connect, and you confuse rather than reveal.

My friend and I connected over this show during a time when we both desperately needed to feel closer to someone. We were hungry, lonely, overworked, poor, depressed, and only really had each other. But now, it’s become a source of disconnection—because now that I’ve been able to process the effects the show had on me, I’m embarrassed to tell him why I can’t stomach it anymore. And it’s also disconnected me from the writers of the show, because whatever they were trying to show me, it did not come through. Their carelessness got in the way.

The worldview behind a work is essential to what the work is about. If that story is ultimately good, something connecting, then don’t let anything get in its way. Insensitive, careless content is going to hurt the people we want to receive what we’re showing—and they won’t even receive it in the process.

The point of this post is not merely to say, “Hire sensitivity editors!” (although I do highly recommend doing so). Rather, it’s that anyone who creates art needs to consider what they’re showing with that art. This isn’t a political concern that clashes with art, it’s what art is fundamentally about. We show others our worldview with our stories—whether we realize it or not—and it’s important not only to make that worldview accessible, but to make sure nothing is getting in way of seeing what we hope to show.

Ensuring art is sensitive to its audience isn’t needlessly politicizing it, it’s helping that art connect rather than disconnect—which is why we make art in the first place.

May is an and editor and sensitivity consultant who is talking new clients. Please check here for details.

If you liked this post and want read May’s fiction writing, please check out her debut novel Lord of the Last Heartbeat!