As egalitarians, we want all people to be treated with equal consideration. There should be no favorites. All people, be they men, women, or children, deserve the same human rights, and the same amount of support.
As it comes to gender, which is our focus here, there are still many problems to be addressed. But we call upon all, paraphrasing a famous actress: you’re either an egalitarian, or you’re a sexist.
What do you think?
From a practical perspective, if someone for example takes the stance that if you’re not a feminist you’re a sexist and refuses the label of egalitarian. Then they’re obviously the sexist one.
From a more theoretical but still really important perspective, life is a quite a bit more complicated than that.
Two person may believe different facts about the world, and as a result have opposite expectations for how an egalitarian person should behave. Obviously in this situation at least one of them would be wrong, but in practice, getting all the facts right is hard enough that I expect that often times both people aren’t completely right about their facts.
Even if both persons are egalitarian minded and have the same facts, they can have different ways to interpret these facts (aka they have different ideologies), which can again lead to them having opposite expectations for how an egalitarian person should act. I’d argue that some ideologies are much more suspect than others, unsurprisingly I tend to find feminist ideologies extremely suspect.
Even if both persons have the same facts AND they interpret them in the same ways. They may value different things which would again lead to different expectation as to how an egalitarian person should act.
Of course anti-egalitarians who want to leverage the political power of presenting themselves as egalitarian will use all three of these as tools to hide their true agenda.