For example I didn’t get a choice to join the community of “biological males”, and without resort to my consent i have always been assumed to be “cisgender heterosexual male”… because of where my parents chose to move during my childhood I was forced against both my interests and my consent to become a member of the “crypto-atheist” community, and through the absurdly violent actions of others I was forced to join both the general “survivors of childhood sexual abuse” and the more specific “male survivors of childhood sexual abuse” communities… all of which have, to some degree or another, required me to adhere to norms and rules and expectations I never got to fully develop for myself. All of the above also required me to keep my, many, secrets, primarily for their comfort and convenience, all so that I could at least appear to be a member of those communities.

The great difficulty was realizing that I, and my self, are themselves a community with a diversity of ideas, all of which exist in the same overlapping spaces I / we know as my / our body and mind, and the senses and emotions the former mediates and distorts for the latter.

So yes, community can be good, but community can also be bad. When the community I didn’t get to choose to join is at its best it tries to foster a safe space for me and my self, and I in turn try to keep that community safe from me and my self. The problem is it was a member of that same community that made me an initiate in it… then other members of that same community that forced me to stay silent about it, in all cases to protect them from seeing (never mind acknowledging) their own secrets.

And yes, absolutely, let us define, refine, and evolve, and let us do so towards the greater good. But let’s also stop protecting communities when it’s the individuals within them that are actually human.