With mainstream discussion around trigger warnings circling the drain of bad faith and broken ethics, Jack Halberstam’s article on the matter was as inevitable as it is unhelpful.

It belongs to the peculiar species of toxicity that activists produce when we struggle manfully against the Jungian shadows created by our work: we stridently accuse others of what we ourselves are, in fact, doing.

This is not to say that Halberstam’s piece is entirely wrong. Trigger warnings are overused in a way that condescends to the traumatised, creating an activist tic that serves primarily to signify fealty to a norm rather than do real community work around the issue of trauma. It is also true that we have indeed built an ...