The phrase evolved from clinical psychiatry, moved from LiveJournal fan fiction to Tumblr to mainstream media, and eventually ended up on college syllabi. Here’s the story of how it happened.
Scroll through Tumblr, search on Twitter, or glance over almost any feminist blog and you're bound to stumble upon the “trigger warning,” a bold introductory statement alerting readers that unsettling content follows. An R rating. A red flag in an otherwise chaotic and unpredictable internet that suggests the text may unearth traumatic memories within you, or bring you back to that pinnacle moment when your life was divided into “before” and “after.”
The clinical notion of triggering dates back far as 1918, when psychologists tried to make sense of “war neurosis” in World War I, and later World War II, veterans. The term “post-traumatic stress disorder” came into use after the Vietnam War, but was not recognized as a diagnosable affliction until 1980. Then, psychologists started to work with clients to identify possible PTSD “triggers,” or a sensory input that somehow resembles the original trauma. But anticipating them is notoriously difficult. They assume disparate and unpredictable forms. An essay, or film, or other piece of media might trigger a person, as could a sound or a smell, a physical space, a specific object, or a person.
The digital response, the term “trigger warning,” is now everywhere. It is common on feminist websites from xoJane to The Hairpin, and has been debated in a number of mainstream publications that have never even adopted the phrase, from The Guardian to the Associated Press.
This has happened as sexual assault becomes a larger part of the national conversation: Last week the White House released anti-rape PSAs and launched a task force for better responding to sexual assault on college campuses. And the term trigger warning has adapted too. It has now moved offline and onto college campuses, where some students are asking for trigger warnings on class syllabi.
Of course, content warnings on media existed prior to the internet: There's the graphic-content warning before a television show or a video game, or the rating system for movies. But where did the phrase “trigger warning” come from, and how did it dominate the internet and inch into our offline lives?
Tracking down the first time the phrase “trigger warning” appeared on the internet proves nearly impossible, but it's clear that the term did not enter the web fully formed. Before the “trigger warning” became the accepted way to brace readers for explicit content, bloggers prefaced stories with “This might be triggering,” or “This deals with some eating disorder stuff,” or “Warning: potential trigger.”
Some version of the term began appearing on feminist message boards in discussions of sexual assault in the late '90s. Andi Zeisler, the co-founder and editorial/creative director of the feminist publication Bitch magazine, said the phrase often popped up on a community forum on Ms. Magazine's website.
“The first time I saw trigger warnings used was on Ms. Magazine's bulletin board in the late '90s and early '00s,” she said. “It might have been on other feminist sites, but I only remember seeing it on Ms.”
By the early 2000s, the term had found its way to LiveJournal, where it was used on fan fiction.
Gaby Dunn, a writer and early adopter of Tumblr and LiveJournal, said when she was using LiveJournal around 2001, fan fiction communities warned one another of explicit content but seldom used the phrase that has been adopted today.
“When we'd write fan fiction on LiveJournal, we might say, 'This includes a rape storyline,' or something, but that phrase ['trigger warning'] was never used,” Dunn said.
The concept of triggering wasn't just applied to fan fiction; other users in recovery from addition or self-harm began to use it around the same time. On LiveJournal, some iteration of the trigger warning was first posted in 2002, according to the site's public archive. A user warned her followers that she was “pro-ana,” and a commenter asked what that meant. The author explained:
It pretty much just means that there are eating disorder-related entries in my journal that are considered triggering to anorexics and bulimics that are in recovery from the disease. I felt obligated to post a warning/disclaimer.
Another post from 2002 asked users to “be courteous and use an lj-cut with a warning in the text before any possible triggers [for self-harm].” (An lj-cut allows you to hide all or part of your entry behind a link.)
The actual words “trigger warning” gained traction on the website a year later. A version of the phrase was used in the title of a July 2003 post that spread across the website, and is still archived on LiveJournal, called “What Type of Self-Mutilation Are You? (Warning: Triggering Pictures).”
In the years that followed, between 2003 and 2007, the exact phrase “trigger warning” appeared in blogs and in comments on LiveJournal 62 times, according to the site's archives. Some are on posts about rape, others eating disorders, and some reference what triggered users in their offline lives. And hundreds of other posts contain notes warning readers about potentially triggering content by using slightly different language.
While warning for triggers became expected in these specific communities, the advent of Twitter in 2006 and Tumblr in 2007, and the growth of Facebook in 2008, mainstreamed the term in a new way. People who used trigger warnings on their personal blogs began sharing content on Twitter and Facebook with the signifier:
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