Lived experience means I've had certain things happen to me that inform my opinion on public policy. And I know I'm not an outlier because countless other women say they've had similar experiences too. These experiences are real and a factual. You're free to disagree, but I think lived experience—everyone's lived experience—work to inform laws and consensus.

And it's not just my experience as a woman of colour that matters; so do the experiences of working-class white men who vote Trump. Ideally, we would find policies that ensure the welfare for both people like me and people like them. Of course, this ain't a perfect world, so we haven't, but I'm an optimist and I think we have more in common than we may think.