>In your opinion can a straight white man know what it’s like to be a woman?

A person can make an attempt to divorce themselves from their default programming to try to empathize with the lived experiences of other people on an emotional level. It's not about some didactic correct answer of whether anyone can truly "know" so much as it's about how people approach art and how people think about this stuff. In the US at least, people of color tend to have a better ability to do this, because it's a skill they've had to cultivate growing up in a landscape where the majority of the popular media they consumed was very much not directly speaking to their lives and experiences, in a multitude of small and sometimes big ways.

I'm a white dude, and for much of my life I was pretty much the default target audience for the majority of popular culture, but even back then (and more so now): not every single piece of art exists with the objective of pointing itself directly at me all the time, because I am not the center of the universe. Now, could I simply encounter this stuff and write it off because I perceived that gap between the art and my immediate connection to it, and dismiss it as some flaw on the part of the art itself? I guess so, but that would be pretty lazy. The more rewarding thing to do is to try to bridge that gap, to meet the art where it's at and put in the effort to think about the ways in which it might speak to experiences that are unlike my own, and then try to empathize with those experiences to the best of my ability. Engaging with art and storytelling should not be a passive process.

We all have default programming, and pre-prescribed ways of looking at the word and constructing meaning from experience. But part of the process of growing up and becoming a well-adjusted person is making the active effort to break away from that default programming, and to cultivate a more broad-minded perspective about the world and the lives of people around you.