Caessium

Every minority-centered movement needs outside oppression to be cohesive. This is because they have nothing in common except that they feel abused by the rest of society in a particular way. The people who don't feel maltreated enough will never join the group, or leave it very quickly. If the identity becomes too accepted by society, the movement will dissolve.

For this reason, every successful minority-centered movement learns how to cultivate this feeling of alienation in its members. Once they lure an outcast by offering them unconditional acceptance, they mold him to never feel welcome outside. They teach him to act, dress and behave in a way that seems weird to the rest of society. They expand his definition of abuse to encompass perfectly normal interaction. They tell him to not trust his friends or family outside the movement and accept unconditionally other members of the group. They also bring him "allies".

"Allies" are pretty much the representation of the enemy, the oppressor. Aside from advertising the movement outside, their role is to be the emotional punching bag. They can't make any decisions about the movement and are expected to unquestioningly follow its every rule. They can't disagree with the full-fledged members of the movement and question their narrative. They are expected to tolerate rude behavior and never speak against it. Those that try to be assertive, are abused until they leave or get broken. The aggressive ones are chased out and used as further proof that the society outside hates the minorities. Only the servile ones can stay.

So the gender movement (as every other similar movement) really has two kinds of people: full-fledged members and "allies".

Full-fledged members:

• Feel like outcasts, but don't do much to fit in. In fact, they do pretty much everything they can to alienate the 'normies'.
• Have an extremely strong group identity. An attack on one of them is an attack on all of them.
• The real or imagined abuse becomes central to their identity, which means a lot of repressed anger.
• This anger frequently gets vented on their "allies", because they're forbidden from retaliating while still representing the enemy. This gives the activists an illusion of a hard-earned win.
• They're always victims, never oppressors. This doesn't mean they always abuse someone, but if they do, it's very easy for them to rationalize it.
• They usually want a quick win. This means a fellow activist or a former "ally" is a better target than the actual enemy because the former usually doesn't know how to defend themselves and can be easily punished by making them persona non grata.

"Allies":

• They're rarely, if ever, assertive. The ones that respect themselves are usually weeded out by the movement.
• In conflict situations, they're passive toward the members of the movement and aggressive toward their perceived enemies and transgressors.
• Always ready to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause, which makes them sometimes more eager to punish the enemies of the movement than the full-fledged members. This makes them more willing to go against harder targets.