Feminism has never been for promoting women for gender’s sake. In fact suggestions that they have done so are essentialist by assuming that women think and act with some hive mind and are as interchangeable as a stepford-wife.Feminism is about a subgroup of women dictating to the rest of us what our rights are. Don't want abortion to be a right? Tough luck, we say so!
Feminism has never been about promoting women for gender's sake. However, opponents of feminism are tarred as opponents to women and not as opponents to ideas about women. If you're going to say that feminism is about ideas-- not women as women-- then you can't automatically assume that those who oppose your ideas are anti-women.
Feminism loses its legitimacy when it excludes those people whose welfare it seeks to advance. It becomes, in a sense, paternalistic.
