At risk of sounding flippant, I feel like you're bringing a certain amount of unwarranted pattern matching to this. The person you're responding to is 1. bringing up a cognitive bias, 2. positing that it might be the mechanism that's causing this treatment, and 3. saying he shouldn't exhibit that bias.
It's thoughtful, and while he's using different language, describing his approach here as "hiding" is pretty ungenerous. I'd guess that you're used to people being kinda shitty about this stuff, and so you saw someone say something that could be part of some ugly apologetics and just went with your heuristics.
(edit) Also, let me add, sometimes it's easier to talk about the mechanisms of sexism rather than the phenomenon. Ideologically I'm super anti-racist/homophobic/sexist/patriarchy/capitalist blah blah blah but talking about those things straight out often feels like the worst place to have a productive conversation from. Compare "The prison industrial complex is a function of white supremacy", vs, "dang, it's messed up that people of color on average get way harsher sentences for the same crime." Context is very important, of course, but sometimes using a lot of words is better communication.
It's thoughtful, and while he's using different language, describing his approach here as "hiding" is pretty ungenerous. I'd guess that you're used to people being kinda shitty about this stuff, and so you saw someone say something that could be part of some ugly apologetics and just went with your heuristics.
(edit) Also, let me add, sometimes it's easier to talk about the mechanisms of sexism rather than the phenomenon. Ideologically I'm super anti-racist/homophobic/sexist/patriarchy/capitalist blah blah blah but talking about those things straight out often feels like the worst place to have a productive conversation from. Compare "The prison industrial complex is a function of white supremacy", vs, "dang, it's messed up that people of color on average get way harsher sentences for the same crime." Context is very important, of course, but sometimes using a lot of words is better communication.