I think a lot of queer people have been sold this idea that community is insular, that you are only safe with people like you and can only relate to people like you and conversely, insidiously, only people like you can ever understand.
Don't you see how dangerous and isolating that is? How much it flattens the human experience and primes you to dehumanize the other? To completely blow past the biphobia and aphobia and transphobia that these attitudes create- don't you see that a heterosexual cisgender man is capable of understanding you? Once you understand that all these boogeymen within the community disappear
I am not saying every cishet man WILL understand you, or that you will always be safe with them. I am saying that you are dehumanizing the other if you think that it is impossible for them to get it. And that it does not matter if you are "punching up", it is still reactionary and isolating for you to believe.
The truth is that you would be hard pressed to find a single experience somehow restricted to one subgroup of people. The reality of the human experience is messy and overlapping and that should not be an ideological danger to you. Common ground is *good* and it should not stop you from talking about your experience with it. If anything the richer the tapestry the more we will understand ourselves *and* others *and* what that common ground means. Because of this, people outside of your group will always be capable of getting it. As you are capable of understanding them. But this is only possible if both sides see eachother as people instead of flattening them into the other.
Even if someone else has not experienced something similar to you: people are capable of empathy or sympathy or understanding regardless. To say that someone isn't is to fail to hold them to a reasonable standard, and this includes cishet men. To not believe they are capable of understanding is to let them slide. Everyone is capable of extending you humanity.
The moment you internalize this, you are safer because you are less isolated. You will be less easily swindled by conmen and predators within your ingroup looking to further isolate you. You will be a better person because it will better prime you to extend humanity and understanding to other minority groups regardless of how much common ground you have. And many of these fears within the community of these "secretly privileged interlopers who don't deserve to be here and could never understand us" will melt away











