If you think treating people differently based on race is fine, you ARE a racist. If you think treating people differently based on sex is fine, you ARE a sexist. My dude.

People ARE treated differently based on race and gender. For example, women are severely underrepresented in the tech industry.

You can either look into why that is and attempt to address underlying issues, or you can pretend people are sexist for doing something that doesn't directly benefit you.

The way how you respond and means of addressing the issue very much matters. It's possible to have equitable objectives, but using discriminatory means. For example, just declaring quota and filling to order will fulfill the objective, but will be very discriminatory in practice.

Equity vs. Equality. Google it, “my dude”.

I do think a lot of these people who claim reverse racism just have no idea what the word “equity” even means.

That would be true if the society was already perfectly fair and neutral (which some people believe).

However, there is racism and sexism in the world (it's systemic, in a sense it's not about one person not liking another personally, but biases propagated throughout the society). To counter that, you need to recognize it, and it will be necessary to treat some people differently.

For example, women may not feel safe being a small minority at a gathering full of men. If you do nothing, many potentially interested women will not show up. You could conclude that it's just the way things are and women are simply not interested enough in the topic, or you could acknowledge the gender-specific issue and do something about it. But this isn't a problem affecting everyone equally, so it would require treating women specially.