ยง Thoughtful discussion on the limits of safe spaces
(2) You cannot make all valuable, positive, motivated people feel safe. It's really sad, but there are fundamental incompatibilities in the kind of safety that different people need (even before we get to what makes them productive--you can't even make everyone feel comfortable!). I think this discussion has demonstrated amazing attempts by people at understanding and incorporating different perspectives, but at the end of it all, some people are going to have to be triaged out, or will have to accept some lack of safety. Two examples: (a) people with low self-esteem tend to find confrontational environments unsafe emotionally, but many neurodivergent people tend to find environments that require high social awareness unsafe emotionally. You can ameliorate this contradiction somewhat with careful guidelines, but fundamentally the problem cannot be solved: the neurodivergent simply cannot do what the emotionally fragile require of them, so one or the other or both is going to have a bad time. There is nothing wicked about either of these people! But they're not compatible. (b) people of a category that has faced systematic discrimination often do not feel safe with "free speech" that is allowed to get anywhere near sounding like discrimination against them (for very good reason!), but people who have exposure to thought-policing with severe consequences for disobedience often do not feel safe with anything less than very broad construal of "free speech". This one's even harder, because both sides can have really deep emotionally salient reasons for their perspective, and yet they are incompatible. There is nothing wicked about either of these people! But different types of wickedness have been done to them or are reasonably feared by them, rendering them incompatible with
each other.
you are not literally able to make a community welcoming to everyone who, one-on-one, you would consider a good person. Sometimes you can get a few extra valuable people by special-casing things. (E.g. a reasonable response to "I don't understand respect" might be "we are still going to call it respect, but we will maintain an additional note approximating what 'act with respect' means in terms of other concepts that might be easier to actualize for some people".)
I agree that it is not possible to resolve fundamental incompatibilities through policy. However, it often is resolvable through mediation, a third party who can deal with the needs of both sides and is willing and able to translate, clarify, provide private feedback, and otherwise help smooth over the situation.