Something I always want to point to in conversations about "diverse media" is that it would be foolish to conclude that, say, a literary fiction author and pulp romance author's works are interchangeable because "they both write books that have romance in them" etc.
And so, like, why should that be any different if both of them are #OwnVoices authors?
It's definitely worth interrogating bias if you find yourself NEVER engaging with content from certain types of people, like if every show that talks about THOSE people elicits the same reaction no matter how different the material, but I think there needs to be room as well for audiences to have their own tastes.
Like, for me, I really wanted to be excited about a properly trans Trill in Discovery, but I found myself preferring their depiction in DS9, and I felt guilty about that until I realized the main reason why I was so uninterested was that it didn't feel like the story was willing to explore what a trans and bonded Trill actually entails. Jadzia's depiction as a woman of male experience and Ezri's nigh transmasc gender questioning were part of the story, whereas Adira essentially turns to the camera after an unnatural conversation clearly intended to provoke the reveal, explains their gender like a Wikipedia article, and then their dads tell them they're valid.
I'm given to understand that some people really like this style of explicit explanation+affirmation. But I don't. It's not how I feel like people behave. (Then again I also don't like queer media that goes too far the other way on the "realism" meter and becomes needlessly depressing.)
But meanwhile I LOVE the Hexarchate, Radch, and Teixcalaan books, all of which stare the concept of symbiotic relationships straight in the face and go, "what WOULD happen if you had two people in the same head with meaningfully different identities?" Like, straight-up, there's a character in one of these books who wakes up and assumes she's been given SRS while unconscious because she absorbed her symbiont's self-image and he is a man. It's a great detail.
I still have yet to read a book where my Ezri dreams are realized and a person develops a fully different gender identity through seeing the world as someone of another gender sees it tho—either in the sense that Ezri Tigan always had it in them to be a different gender but it was never expressed until they started viscerally knowing what it means to be a guy or even in the sense that Ezri Dax as a composite organism is capable of self-concepts that the previous individual never was
