> What was progressive yesterday becomes conservative today - think of women's rights, interracial marriage, etc. The same goes for 'who' was progressive.
That's really not what's been happening here, though, and the extremely online activists are not simply people who are ahead of the curve on pushing to fix society's flaws. For example, take trans rights, the main weapon currently used to demand people get in line - in reality it was the boring, normie mainstream liberals who dragged the online activists into supporting that in the first place, not the other way around. Until just a few years ago they supported anti-trans viewpoints that were way out of kilter with mainstream society and demanded trans women shut up about harassment campaigns that went just as much against mainstream norms and values as the harassment that the online left is apologists for today. There's a good chance this changed through younger people with different views coming in, but they had those views in the first place because society as a whole had already shifted.
The difference really, genuinely, and consistently is just toxicity, extremism, and a refusal to accept that anyone who deviates even an inch from their views is a decent person. Those are the things that have stayed constant even as the arguments and the targets have shifted. The culture shifts easily from expecting trans women to shut up about TERF harassment campaigns to justifying harassment of streamers who play a game based on a franchise by someone who liked tweets containing TERF views because the cruelty is the point. While the views go beyond what mainstream society is willing to accept, the direction is extremely questionable. (For example, there have been multiple ugly Mastodon disputes involving server operators trying to shut people up about the long trail of rape allegations that follow one specific trans woman around, pretty much all from other trans women. Paying attention to them is supposedly hateful and an attack on trans women. Again, this is one specific person who's allegedly doing it, the same one every single time - not trans women as a whole.)
I find this version of the story very odd. I'm in my mid-20s and figured out that I was trans about 10 years ago. The main reason I didn't get swept up in the anti-SJW craze of the time was because "SJWs" were firmly supportive of trans and non-binary people, while many of their opponents were either indifferent or comparing us to attack helicopters. Are you talking about more than ten years ago?
Ten years ago is actually pretty much spot on for the time period I'm talking about - this was after the point at which trans people were just outright not welcome full stop (which is still surprisingly recent) and in fact one of the big ways the activists justified their views was by finding young trans people much like yourself with no existing ties to trans communities or activism, welcoming them in so long as they went along with the activists' existing views (including support for those who still wanted trans people not to be welcome), and pointing to them as proof their viewpoints totally weren't anti-trans. A lot of the prominent trans voices from that era were just a few years older than you and burned out hard once their worldview and contacts expanded beyond that of the narrow activist community and they discovered the activists wouldn't listen anymore if it brought their moral superiority into question.
The word "TERF" to describe the people and worldview that wanted to exclude trans people and trans rights from social justice activism wasn't even recorded as existing until 15 years ago, not because those views didn't exist - they're traceable in basically their modern form all the way back to like the seventies and are oddly pervasive - but because they succeeded well enough that even discussing the idea that this was a bad thing didn't start to become a part of activist discussion until then. This whole shift in viewpoint to that becoming unacceptable is incredibly recent.
Also, in general ordinary non-terminally-online people were much, much less anti-trans than both the "attack helecopter" anti-SJW side and the anti-trans campaigners that social justice activists were meant to sympathise with, though that may not have been obvious since one of the big things that was unacceptable was actually talking about what anti-trans people on the same side were doing and the real-world consequences (including stuff like laws they lobbied for). Admittedly, I'm from the UK so my experiences may not be representative of the US and other countries, but we are supposedly "TERF island" so that cuts both ways.
That's really not what's been happening here, though, and the extremely online activists are not simply people who are ahead of the curve on pushing to fix society's flaws. For example, take trans rights, the main weapon currently used to demand people get in line - in reality it was the boring, normie mainstream liberals who dragged the online activists into supporting that in the first place, not the other way around. Until just a few years ago they supported anti-trans viewpoints that were way out of kilter with mainstream society and demanded trans women shut up about harassment campaigns that went just as much against mainstream norms and values as the harassment that the online left is apologists for today. There's a good chance this changed through younger people with different views coming in, but they had those views in the first place because society as a whole had already shifted.
The difference really, genuinely, and consistently is just toxicity, extremism, and a refusal to accept that anyone who deviates even an inch from their views is a decent person. Those are the things that have stayed constant even as the arguments and the targets have shifted. The culture shifts easily from expecting trans women to shut up about TERF harassment campaigns to justifying harassment of streamers who play a game based on a franchise by someone who liked tweets containing TERF views because the cruelty is the point. While the views go beyond what mainstream society is willing to accept, the direction is extremely questionable. (For example, there have been multiple ugly Mastodon disputes involving server operators trying to shut people up about the long trail of rape allegations that follow one specific trans woman around, pretty much all from other trans women. Paying attention to them is supposedly hateful and an attack on trans women. Again, this is one specific person who's allegedly doing it, the same one every single time - not trans women as a whole.)