If anyone is genuinely concerned with this issue, and I know a few are, I think a good, solid approach to this question is along the lines of John Stuart Mill's 'Harm Principle'.
Basically, back around 1860's, Stuart came up with the novel idea (until then) that a person's right to speech was limited only by when it would likely harm some other person. Of course, the idea went viral, swept the British Empire, surfaced so popular in America that newspaper editors mistook it for a wet dream, and so on and on to become today's most universally accepted notion of the limits to free speech.
Today, it is under sustained and increasingly threatening attack from an emerging idea that would essentially mean extending Mill's notion of 'harm' from meaning more or less physical or at least seriously mental/emotional harm to much more along the lines of causing any feeling in someone that they had more or less been traumatized by hearing something.
The extension first took root on the extreme left among some fringe academic groups. Mostly, undergraduate students looking for a trendy way to virtue signal, led by a fraction of the adjunct professors on a campus, and especially those not much older than the students.
The idea is still mostly found on the far left, and isn't popular at all even with progressives, but you wouldn't know that if your understanding of the left relies on the right's views of the left.
As always, it's just silly to think you are ever going to find too many Toyota car salesmen you can count on for accurate information about Ford's line. I keep trying to understand why so many of us do that thing when understanding the other side of the aisle. I mean, the competition is a great source for what the other guys won't say about their own product. Granted. But how can we humans so often convince ourselves that a competitor should be our only source of information about their competition?
I think if we were being honest, the idea that words can be so traumatizing as to in some sense warrant being considered legally harmful is a case where it seems empirically true that verbal abuse is a real thing, and a real way to cause someone lasting harm, but perhaps the most important question is whether it's even close to possible to outlaw speech in accord with the extended principle of 'harm' in any way that would not create more damage than it prevented.
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