Write Away

I think part of the reason it's different is because if you get a fact wrong about a gun, people don't take it personally, or attack you personally, if you do--whereas you run a very real danger of that happening if you get something "wrong" about race or sexuality. It's like walking through a minefield. Look what happened to Piers Morgan on Twitter this week, when he said about a transwoman that "she was a boy until she was 18." The trans* community landed on his head like a ton of pissed-off bricks--and he's an ally. I understood why they did, but I'm not sure if he ever got it or not.

I, for one, do not need that kind of shitstorm.

As for the writing part, I write characters and I don't particularly worry about checking boxes for the sake of diversity. Hell, in my last thing I didn't even describe the characters other than the hair color (black) of my female protag. If people scan her as white (in a secondary world fantasy), that's... not really my problem. Ditto with my protag in this other thing; he might be black and gay, but it never actually comes up as part of the story I'm telling. It's difficult to describe a main character in first person; I don't often bother. This may be one of my own limitations, but I'm writing short fiction here; it's short on description anyway.

There's really no good answer to this, unfortunately--other than "write what you want to write and maybe take a look at what you default to and see if changing that up would change the story in an interesting way." Which is what I do anyway, usually.