A lot of people think it's important that people warn about potential spoilers. (SPOILERS: Vader is Luke's father, and Bruce Willis' character in "The Sixth Sense" is actually dead.) Aren't spoiler free zones a form of safe space, and the word "SPOILER" itself a trigger warning?

A friend in the Army told me about one of the training exercises which simulates a car roll. Some people who have been in a car roll get a panic attack if they go through the simulation. The instructor said that if anyone had been in a roll and felt that way then they would be excused from the exercise.

I suffer from acrophobia. I would like some warning that the hotel I'm going to stay in (Hyatt Regency San Francisco, I'm looking at you) has a large open atrium and glass elevator for my room on the 8th floor.

Do you think these are childish and oversensitive reactions? Perhaps. But if so, why call out "Social Justice Warriors" as being unique? If not, what's the difference?

The point isn't that plot twists, car rollovers, and glass elevators don't exist, nor that rape, race, homosexuality, etc. don't exist. It's that some people have been raped, and talking about rape unexpected may lead to unexpected emotional reactions.

Now that I think about it, a few years after 9/11 I was in Sweden taking a Swedish course. It was a 9/11, so the teacher thought it would be an interesting topic for the class. Completely out of the blue, I started thinking about what happened again, and broke out crying. And it's not like I had a close connection to NYC or any of the people involved. I figure if a reaction like that can happen to me, then I can well see how others would be more strongly affected by more personally directed trauma.

Nor was it something I wanted to talk about more at that point. The teacher quickly switched to a different topic, since the goal wasn't to talk about 9/11 but to learn Swedish. It certainly doesn't mean that I want to pretend that 9/11 didn't exist, so I don't think you can make the conclusion you did.

Again, you might say that I'm oversensitive or childish. Shrug At some point how do you know you aren't sensitive enough?

Don't take that to mean that I require warning before anyone talks about 9/11, or that there be some sort of "safe space" for me. I am neither proposing that nor defending it, only arguing against the validity of your proposition that people want safe spaces and trigger warnings as a way to "pretend rape, race, homosexuality, transgenderism etc don't exist by not allowing these words to be spoken, or acts and circumstances to be portrayed, [and thereby] create the environment for these facts of life to rot in the mind of society."