Surely this is not what "write what you know" is meant to convey

My Writing Partner gave a reading of a WIP at an event last month, and
received both very gratifying feedback, and the following question
(admiring I suspect, rather than admonitory) "How can you, as a woman,
write about two gay men?"

What strikes me about the question is what they have focused on. The
novel is question is a sprawling account of London in the 1800s, and has
a cast including sailors, surgeons, foundlings, Vice-Admirals,
resurrectionists, whores, hangmen, rope-makers, methodists, link-boys,
opera singers - and an insane, shipwrecked, intersex missionary from
Dorset who has recently been rescued from slavery in Algiers.
Oh. And some gay men.

The author has never, to my knowledge, sailed a frigate, stolen a
corpse,executed a murder, worked a rope-walk, sung an aria, dissected a
rhinoceros or died of small-pox. Nor indeed was she born in 1770.

But none of these leaps of the imagination seem to challenge the
questioner.

Because this is the crux of creativity, and the source of the radical
power of fiction - the imaginative act of climbing inside another
person's skin, and attempting to see the world through their eyes.
Done poorly, or in bad faith, it's an insulting farce, an act of
colonisation.
Done honestly, it can blow the world apart and joins us back together,
in a new place, where the dust settles into fresh shapes, and the labels
that divide us - him/her/you/me/them/us - have to be reassessed.