[bold emphasis by TM]
Gender theory will be the death of feminism. And feminists came up with it.

By G. R. O'Brian, AUGUST 31, 2016

Feminism, as the instructor of a gender studies course I took as an undergraduate explained, is the belief in women’s social, political, and economic equality. Another definition, by the scholar bell hooks, is “the struggle to end women’s oppression.”

Few people actually favor oppression, so this shouldn’t be a hard sell. But feminism gets more complicated when people follow its its premises to their logical ends. These premises — that gender is a social construction society has used to oppress women — lead inevitably towards eliminating gender, and feminism along with it.

The Gender-Sex Distinction in Feminist Thought
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...most feminist accounts of gender explain it as a socially constructed phenomena, meaning a product of social practices rather than an innate characteristic. Feminists will typically express this belief by stating that society “assigns” our gender through gendered language, the clothes we wear, the toys we are given to play with, the professions we are encouraged to enter, and so forth.

With your average woman who calls herself a feminist, the explanation of gender typically ends there. “Gender is socially constructed” serves as a general rhetorical tool for feminists to protest any norms that limit them in ways they feel are outdated or arbitrary. But the argument that gender is socially constructed leads towards conclusions that feminists seldom embrace.

If gender as a set of norms and behaviors is socially constructed, then gender itself is the source of women’s oppression. In other words, it is not just that women as a group have been oppressed, but that the very classification of “women” is itself oppressive. If this is the case, the logical end of feminism ought to be not gender equality, but rather doing away with gender entirely, and with it the very concepts of men and women.

Eliminating Gender Eliminates Women
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Several feminist theorists have recognized the end goal of feminism ought to be eliminating gender. Notable among them is Shulamith Firestone, who in her 1970 book “The Dialectic of Sex” argued that “the heart of women’s oppression is in her childbearing and child-rearing roles,” and that therefore (employing classic Marxist terminology) “the elimination of sexual classes requires the revolt of the underclass (women) and seizure of the control of reproduction.”

Firestone then arrives at the heart of the matter in calling for eliminating not just gender, but sex differences as well: “the end goal of the feminist revolution must be unlike that of the first feminist movement, not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself; genital differences between human beings would no longer matter.”

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The Problem? Women Usually Like Being Women
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...most women who call themselves feminists view their gender as a positive aspect of their identity and do not wish to see it disintegrated, while recognizing their gender is tied to their biological sex. They want to be able to pick and choose when socially constructed gender roles cause social ills, but they are unlikely to want to do away with gender as a whole in favor of androgyny.

Stuck Between Two Competing Desires
Feminism therefore finds itself stuck, unwilling to to bite the bullet and follow through its logical conclusions of doing away with gender and instead fighting for a social class it needs in order to exist, but whose boundaries it cannot even define.
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If feminism is to regain its favor as a label among women, it ought to abandon the postmodern, neo-Marxian gender theories that nearly everyone finds intuitively implausible, if not incoherent. Feminism ought to recognize that the way we intuitively use the terms “women” and “men” is not evidence of “ideological structures of domination,” but rather that the language we use is based on real concepts that cannot be deconstructed through abusing language.

Furthermore, feminism must acknowledge that men and women have both experienced costs and benefits based on their sex throughout history, and continue to do so today. When feminist theory returns from the realm of academia and aligns itself with the more immediate concerns of women, it can avoid its own elimination.

http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/31/feminism-worst-enemy/