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"It also works in my best interest to use whatever means I have available to make my social environment safe for me; if this involves applying pressure to people who don’t respect peoples’ pronouns or claim that “gender is determined by biology,” that’s entirely consistent with anarchism. Hensley has a much different view on this than I do: “Anarchism is about building a society in which no one forces their beliefs on others. As long as you respect the views and lives of others, your personal views don’t matter.”

…no, it’s not. Depending on the specific definition of “forcing one’s beliefs onto others,” there’s plenty of ways one could fit “forcing their beliefs on others” into a consistent, principled anarchism. If someone accuses me of forcing my belief that trans women are women onto them, I don’t see that as anti-anarchist unless I suggest using hate crime legislation to put transphobes in prison. In any ideal safe space, incentives exist to keep bad actors out and encourage positive behaviors. “Force” is arguably used when we kick someone out of a space for using slurs or when we make fun of Trump supporters, yet I wouldn’t expect many anarchists to be against such actions."

I definitely think that people should NOT humiliate and fuck with trans people based on their identities, but overall the frame of mind expressed in the essay is also very consistent with a stringent and very punitive thinking that's not any different from normal society and how it treats criminals...sans the prisons. Enforcing "safe-spaces" definetly implies an authoritarian erasure of everything that doesn't accommodate it, or at least a generalized in-group sense of fear in terms of stepping out of line with the popular beliefs and opinions. I definitely am willing to sacrifice personal safety for living more sensually and impulsively, and i look very suspiciously at people who are willing to throw impulsivity under the bus in favor of sacred ideals/ideas.

However, i do fully agree that Hensley's essay is pretty stupid, this idea that anarchism is about "converting people", or engaging in some sort of demographic recruiting exercise. I'm from appalachia, and even though it's overwhelmingly right-wing and conservative, the way that people express their points of view relating to that is pretty diverse. The most unfortunate thing is that people overall out here are still fairly racist, homophobic, transphobic, and xenophobic, yet i fully believe a lot of that would disappear if the news media didn't invest so much time, energy, and money into keeping people afraid of crime and the unknown. To try to turn these gullible folk into anarchists means just playing antagonism to their normal saviors, and yes their mentality is often so shrouded in fear that they will figure it out. I'd rather just play devils advocate when it suites me than center my identity around some sort of principled and STATIC anarchist praxis.