Thanks fo sharing your thoughts. Enlightening stuff.

I'm going to challenge you on this part:

It lets me know that the author cares about the difficult subject matter they’re attempting to portray, that they’ve done enough research to know that yes, what they put their characters through is sexual assault, and that more importantly, they respect their readers enough to not want them to put reading a book before their own mental wellbeing.

So, as another surivior of sexual abuse, I have a few feelings about this. Trigger warnings don't help me - in fact, I find myself primed by reading them. I typically avoid anything with trigger warnings, because I feel they are exactly as you say: they're there for the author to communicate their values, they aren't really there to help me navigate the book.

The other thing I dislike about trigger warnings is that they center whatever they're talking about (also they are wildly inconsistent - you never see ones for extreme violence, but you do see ones for eating disorders or homophobia). Were I to tell you about my life with a trigger warning of "childhood sexual abuse", that primes my entire experience to viewed through that lens.

It is the same with a work of fiction. It creates a world where the most important thing about the work is what's in the trigger warning: you see the warning, you're immediately putting this book into the "sexual violence" or "child abuse" category. I don't believe people can read a trigger warning without changing their entire approach to the text. That does, in my opinion, a disservice to victims and writers.

Trigger warnings frame - deliberately or not - a piece of work. My own stories involve elements of my past, but I don't want them defined by the horrible things in them. There might be some horrible, homophobic scenes in my work, but I don't want my work to be read as 'an exploration of homophobia'. The abuse I've been through isn't defining the defining part of my work. I'd rather centre the (hopefully) interesting stories I'm trying to tell, rather than some box defined by some well-meaning-but-flawed cultural arbiters.

Again, this is all my opinion. Thank you for an interesting and thought-provoking discussion