'k check it.

I live in the most liberal section of the most liberal city of the United States. My kid's daycare serves gluten free and allows unvaccinated kids.

My wife is the go-to in the GLBT community for intrauterine insemination. A goodly portion of her income comes from intimate health services for lesbians. She sees sexual trauma regularly; in fact, she has a 1-page questionnaire for her patients because those things manifest in detrimental ways during childbirth.

When I asked her how much "trigger warnings" were coming up in her conversations, I had to explain what they were.

So allow me to repeat myself: this shit exists in a handful of universities and is debated pointlessly on the Internet. That's it. Yes, you see it in your Facebook feed because people are used to getting yelled at by friends of friends of friends and they all see each other using it, kind of the way old people spell out "hashtag" and think "LOL" means "lots of love."

That doesn't make it a thing.

When I was in 8th grade Newsweek lost their shit because some feminist somewhere decided "women" should be spelled "womyn" and the country collectively lost their shit. Two years later the country collectively lost their shit again over "ebonics" - whereby the country collectively lost their shit because a city university in Oakland recognized street language as a separate vernacular but for some reason, that meant all our children will be forced to learn "black talk" in order to get into college. When I was shortly out of college the social worker I was putting through grad school was required to learn seven genders in order to not oppress the GLBT community and soon enough we all would, dammit! Terk er jerbs! Terk er freedoms!

Yet here we are.

Nobody remembers ebonics.

Womyn is a footnote.

Chelsea Manning is a she and not even Rush fucking Limbaugh gives a shit - his whole beef with sex change operations is apparently in Dittoland gender reassignment somehow comes with a new identity. Which, for Rush Limbaugh, is pretty goddamn progressive.

So no - it's not more nuanced. It's less nuanced if anything because I've lived this shit my whole life. My mother taught alternative medicine in Santa Fe. My cousin taught prenatal yoga in Santa Monica and now teaches it in Boulder. I went to a black lesbian wedding in 1985 and you know what? There will always be a tiny, irrelevant lunatic fringe that will come up with some idea about how the world might be a little better if everyone made a change and a giant, vocal backlash movement freaking out about how it's taking away their freedoms.

That one person you know on Facebook that uses the phrase "trigger warning" from time to time? Yeah, I'll bet you a dollar she doesn't use it in real life.

And if it isn't in real life, it isn't worth a fucking article in NYMag.