I don't think people can reliably tell the difference between the two, probably especially when they feel they have higher status than the person being addressed. At the moment, we're getting a variant of the problem in regards to gender.

I'm looking at what you said here, and the paragraph I wrote whose format it echoes, and I can't help but think we're talking about two very different things.

Who decides the emotional significance of a statement?

The person whose emotions were touched off by it. Easy, right?

The question I'd be tempted to derive from your connotation here is more like: "Who gets to decide which interpretations of those reports-of-emotional-significance are being proposed as the priority for the purposes of conflict resolution and communication?"

(My answer to that is "the question is slightly broken", but I'm about to head out so can't give you the preferred reframing right this moment).

Social justice as currently practiced is probably not going to be the last experiment in working on it.

Oh, definitely not. It has plenty of its discontents, even within the movement, who aren't satisfied with the tools and methodologies available, its failure modes, and so on. That's being actively discussed in many spaces, I've observed.