Do trigger warnings have a place in academia? What about the larger societal context?

I think that, like most of the class, this week has made me very conflicted about trigger warnings.  I have been left with more questions than answers as I ponder a few different questions:

Who are trigger warnings designed for? What do they actually do? Which bodies are given priority with them? Who has the authority to decide what things are "triggering" - who decides what someone gets to be triggered by? Is there a hierarchy of "triggers" - is an article mentioning abuse more valid as a trigger than a school bus? What experiences are worth being protected from - whose bodies are then worth being protected?

As I said – more questions than answers. For this discussion, I want to really focus in on what we’ve been talking about all week: How do trigger warnings work to silence or encourage discussion and debate (in academia for this blog post) and then how does neoliberalism fit into all of it?

In the classroom, there are arguments on both sides – some think trigger warnings are more likely to stifle conversation, while others think they are more likely to engage with students. One of the arguments I found most compelling was included in “The Ethics of Trigger Warnings in the Classroom,” a blog post by Stacey Gogeun. Gogeun quoted Kate Manne who wrote an interesting piece on why she uses trigger warnings in her classroom which you can find here. Manne states that the use of trigger warnings “signals to everyone else – i.e., the students who have no need whatsoever to opt out of the discussion – that this is a morally serious subject which we are going to approach in a morally serious way, remembering that what we are talking about real lives, real bodies, and real social practices.” She argues that trigger warnings work to make valid the fact that academic study has implications within lived experience.
On the flip side, some argue that trigger warnings are coddling minds in academic settings by creating a culture where difficult subjects are not talked about, The Atlantic wrote a large piece on this. While the so-called coddling of the mind has not been my experience in academia, I can see why some may think that could happen. My own personal experience has much more been that we address difficult topics with a sensitivity that discussing them may be hard for some, and leave space for people to have reactions and feel what they need to.

In “Taking Offense: Trigger Warnings & the Neoliberal Politics ofEndangerment” by Lisa Duggan, as well as “You Are Triggering me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma” by Jack Halberstam, we can clearly see that neoliberalism works with trigger warnings by having a “rhetoric of individual pain [that] obscures the violent sources of social inequity” (Halberstam). They seem to argue that neoliberalism centres our individual feelings around an issue, and makes it so political issues are psychologized and turned into individual issues. Do you agree that the neoliberal politics of trigger warnings work to ensure that structural issues are pushed onto a solely individual level?
Are trigger warnings really centred around feelings? I'd also be curious if people think that certain kinds of triggers are privileged over others, and what determines who decides what is triggering for people - and following from this, does neoliberal rhetoric decide what is worth a trigger warning and what is not? Does neoliberalism value certain kinds of trauma over others? To think about this, I have looked up lists of "common triggers" that people believe should be used; one such list is here.