Everyone should be treated like an individual - but the reality is that they aren't. And a lot of this country doesn't want to treat people that way - otherwise we wouldn't have the statistics that I quoted. People are discriminated against due to their demographic, so until we address that, just be and act like an individual is meaningless.

One of the points of the OP was that people should be able to be individuals and be evaluated on their merits but that isn't how the world currently works. You can't address systemic issues without systemic changes. And my flag of the moment is that violence against women will not stop until men do the work to shift the current culture of masculinity away from being centered in domination in general and control of women in particular. You being a good guy who doesn't do that stuff has literally no impact on whether or not women will continue to be oppressed and abused at staggering numbers by men.

The same could be said about any number of other glaring injustices. We can never approach a Star Trek culture until we take stock of and address the ways that inequity is baked into our social system.