I don’t mean that everyone with a self-proclaimed identity should bear its maximum. But I think people need to be mindful of the force fulcrum weight of the signified (bodily lived experience) behind various dizzying signifiers in the symbolic order. So at least we could try to avoid some irresponsible appropriation that actually does not empower - but oppresses people you want to represent (or replace). A critical stance against essentialism does not have to summon a new regime of nominalism, and I’ve seen how irresponsible appropriation causes harm to the most vulnerable ones.
The risks, costs, pains, and burdens people have been carrying are factual rather than rhetorical. Meanwhile one thread of the oppressed cannot justify another thread of (even just potentially) harming others. That’s also an essential dimension of the intersectionality theory.
That’s why even when we know the syntax and semantics of “all lives matter” are technically correct, but we tend to focus on the accentuated morality behind that is highly suspicious. What does this “correct” statement have to do with any concrete reality of risks, costs, pains, and burdens - which we forgot to mention otherwise? It is within a net of interwoven axes of capitalism, heteronormativity, racism, and in China, the Asiatic mode of authoritarianism. I also recall how generations of black feminism get me to the point. It is not only in that different threads of power and oppression do not cancel each other, but also for the long lost ground of bearing one’s queerness that, even at its minimum form, gives credit to their somatic affect alongside any other immunity from orconcomitant of suffering.
Let’s do the labour to make it clear.