See, this is why it’s actually important to know your enemy and not just dismiss them as ridiculous evil creatures who can’t possibly have any common ground with you. If you don’t know what exactly you’re fighting for and why you can really easily fall into some traps that aren’t too obvious to people who aren’t paying close enough attention.
If your understanding of feminism is just “men are bad because they subjugate women” and you don’t understand intersectionality or the actual practice of gender hierarchy and how it impacts people, it’s easy to extrapolate that over time to a very basic Manichean view of “men are inherently evil and their existence is a net negative for women everywhere”. Right there, you go from standing up for women’s rights, a fine and worthy cause, to making marginalized men (say, trans men & AMAB enbies, men of color, poor men, typically even butch women) unsafe & unwelcome by putting femininity on a pedestal and throwing masculinity in the trash. It even feeds into the MRA narrative that feminists are just man-hating crazies, legitimizes your opposition and makes a worthwhile fight harder for no good reason.
If your understanding of gender theory is just a memorized list of gender and sexual identities and the qualities supposedly inherent to each, you end up misrepresenting actual people whose understanding of themselves doesn’t fit into the boxes we use for easy categorization. And if you don’t understand nuance there, you’re going to end up harming members of your own community by rejecting outright someone’s personal truth because, “That’s not how I heard it works so you must be lying for attention/trying to weasel your way into a space that isn’t yours.”
If your understanding of racism is “it’s an immutable personality trait inherent to white people that only impacts poc,” you start to run into the same problems that white supremacists do. Who exactly counts as white? What are “white” behaviors and patterns and how should they be policed? Do white-passing poc count for the other side or not? Eventually you split so many hairs that you end up alienating potential allies in the pursuit of racial purity which really doesn’t feel progressive, does it?
If your understanding of modern American politics is “Republicans are all irredeemable Nazis who actively want you dead,” you’re not wrong about a really worrying amount of them, but keep in mind you’re talking about around 36.4 million people. It’s easy to lose track when the majority of conservatives you encounter are bad-faith internet trolls and edgelords that most of them are just older people who don’t care enough to think about the impact of their vote - and that a lot of these people can, in fact, be reached. And, of course, when you treat them all like hicks and rubes and idiots, you just end up insulting them. In the end, who are they gonna listen to? The guy who calls them an asshole while telling them the truth or the guy who pats them on the back, says “Hey, I understand what you’re going through, isn’t it a shame that the other side won’t listen?” and lies through their teeth?
My point being: nuance is the most important thing you can try to find in any argument and righteous anger can only get you so far before it consumes you and turns to hatred. Everything fueled by emotion at the expense of understanding leads to ruination and pain, left or right, male or female, queer or straight. We’re all human, we’re all capable of being wrong and we all have blind spots, it’s essential to understand that and allow yourself to be wrong and to grow from it. Every viewpoint ends up overlooking something, no man can see everything at once. You have to listen to others and take them seriously when they tell you what they are - never assume you know the inner machinations of someone’s mind better than they know themselves, even if you think it’s blaringly obvious because hey, one man’s common sense is another man’s obvious lie.
