Of course, harassment that manifests as desire (however brutal or twisted) conveys, too, that a woman is valuable at work only insofar as she provides sexual amusement. But suggesting that a woman’s sexuality is responsible for her demonstrable achievements — such as, say, winning election to the United States Senate — is an insult precisely because it implicates her in the harasser’s own low opinion of women’s abilities. Slurs like Mr. Trump’s reinforce the idea that without sex to offer, women are worthless, in the same way harassers do when they demand that women fork over sexual favors to have the chance to achieve with their legitimate labors what their male colleagues do.

By 1993, Teresa Harris’s case had made its way to the Supreme Court. The court already had ruled, seven years earlier, that “severe or pervasive” harassment that creates an “abusive work environment” can constitute sex discrimination. At issue in Ms. Harris’s case was what kind of proof was needed for conduct to cross the line from merely offensive to unlawful. The lower courts had refused to find that Charles Hardy’s conduct passed that threshold, because Ms. Harris herself had not shown its effects. Although she had suffered grievously — developing a drinking problem and chronic insomnia, among other symptoms — she had continued to perform exceptionally at work.

The court concluded that focusing on the victim’s response to harassment was the wrong inquiry; what mattered was the egregiousness of the conduct itself, and whether a “reasonable person” would find it abusive. Mr. Hardy’s behavior, the justices found, met that test. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed during oral argument, “If you take a similarly situated man and a woman, and the woman is constantly told, you’re a woman, you think like a woman, and her co-worker is not told those things, doesn’t that make their job more difficult?” How can employment opportunity be equal, she asked, “if one is being called names and the other isn’t?”

Senator Gillibrand does not work for President Trump, of course. But as the #MeToo movement forces us to reckon with the varied forms of harassment infecting our workplaces, Mr. Trump’s smear is instructive. We’re now learning just how many bosses and colleagues share his belief that women’s sexual currency is their most salient characteristic. When we see that belief in action, we should call it by its proper name: sex discrimination.