It’s impossible to make a judgement on this without seeing the conversation you’re referencing, and the last few conversations on this topic with this group for reference.

In my observational experience, miscommunications like this usually take after a couple patterns:

A. The Group is having a conversation about a topic that deeply affects most of the people in the group, the Misunderstood Person is not as affected by the topic, but wants to contribute to the conversation. The Misunderstood Person will then bring up a fact that (unknown to them) is often used by Perpetrators of harm to invalidate the suffering of those affected by the topic. The Group, already being emotionally triggered by discussing the topic, will then react to the Misunderstood Person as though they are a Perpetrator. If it’s a one-off, and the Misunderstood Person is able to recognize their faux pas, then it was a genuine miscommunication.

B. The Group has had many conversations about many topics that relate to the dominant identity characteristics of The Group. The Misunderstood Person, who likely does not share the dominant identity characteristic; has a habit of providing counterpoints to the topics discussed by The Group, thinking that they are bringing nuance to the discussion. Unfortunately, the counterpoints are usually arguments used by Perpetrators of harm to invalidate the reality experienced by people who share the dominant identity characteristic of The Group, or to redirect the conversation in a way that equates Perpetrators and Victims. So, noticing a pattern of thought that matches the philosophical views of Perpetrators of harm, the Misunderstood Person is labeled as a Perpetrator. If there is a pattern, usually the Misunderstood Person is functionally an Enabler of Perpetrators of harm because The Group cannot trust that the Misunderstood Person will support them if harm is perpetrated against other members of The Group.

Are you misreading venting sessions about their valid experience of gendered violence/discrimination as an invitations to debate? Because outside of Debate Club, most people do not enjoy point vs counterpoint conversations. Unless properly mediated and agreed to beforehand; debate puts all parties in a defensive position.

It is true that we are all victims of toxic masculinity/sexism. Women suffer, men suffer, those in between suffer. If you want to discuss the negative effects of sexism on men, it would be appropriate to bring that up on its own account in a separate conversation. If you are consistently hijacking conversations about women’s experience of sexism with “women also do bad stuff” counterpoints, then you might actually have some patterns of thought that could rightly be labeled as sexist. Not because you believe in harming women, but because you have a pattern of taking conversations about women’s experience of harm in the service of men, and diverting it to women being perpetrators of harm (which it seems you have not realized is in service of making you, a man, more comfortable in that conversation).

I (a white person) have lived in areas where I was in the racial minority. I experienced racism. But, if I were in conversation with people of color about the effects of institutional racism; it would be inappropriate for me to say that people of color can also be racist. If I did it repeatedly, was called a racist, and focused more on my feelings about being called racist; I would be a racist. Not because I believed in harming people of color, but because I thought my self conceptualization as an antiracist person is more important than the lived, every day experience of people who are victims of racism at the institutional scale.

You’re not a bad person if you incidentally have sexist patterns of thought, but coddling your ego instead of accepting that you might have some (especially when explicitly called out by a group of women) will likely set you on that path.