Humans love making tribal enemies and hate trying to think about how they might be humans as well.

How we get things like TERFs, but also why progressive movements can't seem to collect, because actually communicating or trying to understand the paradoxical complexity of our different lived experiences is somehow insulting to our legitimate grievances. we can totally under no circumstances understand when another group has their own, but different grievances. That would be too much I guess.

OP does a good job showing how weirdly nonsensical that becomes, such as with TERFs, when you start just seeing other people as people, and can distinguish individual preference and lifestyle from the evil of authoritarian stomping out of individual preference and lifestyle. I can comprehend most of feminism as the former, and TERFs strictly as the latter, through ignorance of and assault on the autonomy of trans people. TERFs also affirm themselves socially reifying(making real) some bad rumours about trans people that are accepted because people are susceptible to socialized stories that segregate and tribalize us. There's a whole essay to be made on why trans people tend to be the first demonized group by fascists, which is just using human "surprisal reactions" to confabulate believable stories that "make sense" of that surprise in a way that is inexpensive to share locally. So human ape do tribal bullshit, and don't think about the fascists pushing the narrative. suddenly a mild difficulty in comprehension turns into a fight against demon spawn that are after our children.

The tricky part is when you see a feminist yelling at a MRA for trying to make circumcision illegal in the USA as physical abuse of babies. Is this inherently misogynistic? Or progressive? Does the actual belief and action get drowned by the MRA label painting them as anti-progressive?

Or is this the same TERF style refusal to believe male babies are also humans deserving of autonomy? Or is the very existence of FGM in completely unrelated locations a reasonable enough excuse to shame the MRA as misogynist?

This type of progressive infighting has been abundant yet entirely unnecessary, while actual anti progressives take the cake and run away with it.

Notably heritage foundation types, or things like elon musk unilaterally removing medicine for countless mothers and their babies.

Surely doubling down on the war against other progressive groups was the right decision. /s

I just wish more progressive could comprehend this and successfully scale cooperation verses being divided and conquered. I'm sure cooperation wouldn't become easier if every feminist had to explain they weren't a TERF to a crowd that refused to comprehend the level of complexity that a big group like feminism is going to have inevitable paradoxical offshoots that are anti progressive without comprehending how.

Bringing up this failure in most progressive groups unsurprisingly gets you labelled as 'bad enemy tribe' and banned so nobody has to spend energy thinking about it.

Guess what kind of thing destroyed the active movements fighting the heritage foundation and types before they again acquired political influence and started going full fascist on progressives? Spoiler, it was groups that suddenly started getting pushed as anti progressive so hard that it successfully discouraged and disbanded the progressives within the groups, dissolving all collective effort against the now in power fascists.

See also: why must progressives segregate by race, and never think about why we must define ourselves by surface features above all else?

There a kid over there appreciating something from a culture that doesn't match their skin colour? Better lynch them for stealing something that belongs to a different label of human. are they growing into an inappropriate shape for their colour? Any other style of defining ourselves must be completely incompatible with recognizing legitimate grievances or generational trauma, so instead we should yell at that kid for not recognizing the label we put on them, which is important because of the historical trauma of such labels. Don't think about how circular this is, or how we can actually define humanity into better healing and cooperative shapes in the future. There are very real bigots that are actually in power, and I doubt stephen miller's problem growing up was navigating too far out of his racial and cultural bubble.

Also never ever think about how other progressive groups likely formed out of their own experience of trauma. It must be a lie, and they are after your cookies.

Just don't think about people with actual wealth and power, actively enacting anti-women anti-lgbt, anti-freedom from religion, and just generally anti-human/life policies.

Lots a snide in this, but hope people can comprehend where it is being directed.

Progressives need to start comprehending and cooperating with other progressives past tribal label associations. I guess this framing is the one good thing TERFs can bring us, because I think we could all imagine how gross it would be if the whole feminist label was socialized to be identical to TERF, and how bad that would be for feminist groups and movements trying to fight for important issues. This is also not entirely impossible in the future, SJWs were definitely an attempt at this, and it was pretty successful, and largely made possible by the larger problem in communication and cooperation leaving few to speak out against the larger anti progressive framing being pushed.

Small note that this doesn't mean we would become one uniform amalgam with no separation of salience. Diversity in cooperative systems is how we get things like a functional body rather than a sole lung gasping for air on the sidewalk. Self segregating is basically using the fascist divide and conquer against ourselves, and I hope we can built tools to get beyond that and actually collectively respond.