There are loads of good reasons to vote for Hillary Clinton. Lots and lots of them! And absolutely none of them have anything to do with her gender. But you wouldn’t know this from the flurry of coverage this week about her presidential candidacy, from her critics but also from many of her supporters, which in many cases has focused not just primarily but solely on the fact that she is, yes, a female woman type person.

And I’ll be honest with you: I find this reductive characterisation of her somewhat trying when Clinton has so many impressive achievements on her CV beyond her sex chromosomes.

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Clinton herself, a second-wave feminist to the bone, would have once abhorred this simplification of her character – but, with this candidacy, she appears to be embracing it more. “Don’t you someday want to see a woman president?” she teased an audience back in March. Well, sure, that would be nice, is my answer, but you know what matters more to me? A president who is good for women’s rights and good for the country. And as anyone who remembers the Thatcher years in Britain knows (and let’s not even mention Sarah Palin’s brief moment in the political sun), a female leader does not always guarantee that.

But here’s the great thing about Clinton: she’s excellent on women’s rights. If you want to see her being a completely righteous badass, look up her confrontation with the anti-abortion Republican lawmaker Christopher Smith in Congress in April 2009, in which Clinton pretty much served him up cold on a platter. “I’ve been in African countries where 12- and 13-year-old girls are bearing children. I have been in Asian countries where the denial of family planning consigns women to lives of oppression and hardship,” she said to the flummoxed looking Smith. “We happen to think that family planning is an important part of women’s health – and reproductive health includes access to abortion – that I believe should be safe, legal and rare.”

Another Republican lawmaker, Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, then piped up, accusing the Obama administration of “using American policy to export abortion”. Clinton remained defiant and referred to the disastrous policies of the Bush era: “We have for eight years followed the policy that you have described. And I think we’ve gone backwards. We’ve gone backwards in the real, genuine care that we have given to women.”

Now that, to my mind, is just one very good and very feminist reason to vote for Clinton, and a far better one than her gender. She stands up to Republican men who try to control women’s bodies and she has the knowledge and experience to know the truth about what women – of different demographics, of different nationalities – need.

I’ve read a lot in recent days about the excitement felt by some women at the prospect of seeing “someone who looks like them in the Oval Office”. Now, I personally would hate to see someone like me in charge of the free world (the last thing America needs is to be ruled by a dog-crazy 80s movie obsessive with light OCD tendencies) but I do understand this.

One of the defining images from the Obama presidency will be that of the five-year-old black boy visiting the Oval Office, reaching up to touch Obama’s hair to see if it feels like his. It’s thrilling to think that the country where I was born might finally have evolved to the point where a black man and a woman can be elected leaders.

But if people don’t like hearing human arguments against Darwinism, such as Wayne LaPierre dismissing Obama and Clinton as “demographically symbolic”, then perhaps the first step would be not to discuss them first and foremost as demographic symbols. Sure, there is some fun to be had in getting all het up over the misogyny spewed by LaPierre’s ilk, with their predictably sexist focus on Clinton’s menopause, her marriage and what-have-you.

Clinton is the only one who fully believes in things such as, oh, let’s start with science

And sure, it’s exciting to think that a vote for Clinton is really one in the eye to those people. But those idiots are irrelevant to why Clinton should be president. Should Clinton win, these people are not going to feel schooled in any way – their self-centred resentment will continue to fester like pustulating boils on their soul, as it has done during Obama’s presidency, and that’s their problem. Just ask any black person in America if Obama’s presidency has made any racist less racist, and stand back while they laugh in your face.

There has also been talk about what Clinton’s presidential candidacy represents, but I’ll tell you precisely what it represents: the best chance to keep the increasingly extremist Republican party out of the White House. So far, out of the four candidates who have announced their candidacy, Clinton is the only one who fully believes in things such as, oh, let’s start with science.

Marco Rubio doesn’t believe human activity affects climate change; Ted Cruz doesn’t believe in climate change, full stop; Rand Paul, meanwhile, a medical school graduate, has said that vaccines can cause mental disorders. This is a universal attitude among all likely GOP contenders, including relative centrists such as Chris Christie and Jeb Bush, who have had to cut their beliefs to fit their party. New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait writes in this week’s issue: “The argument for Clinton in 2016 is that she is the candidate of the only major American political party not run by lunatics.”

Of course, Clinton isn’t every liberal’s dream candidate. Her views on gay marriage have had to, shall we say, evolve. Her closeness to Wall Street, her hawkishness, her heretofore lack of interest in changing structural income inequalities: all of these are why many liberals look longingly towards Elizabeth Warren, Jim Webb and Bernie Sanders. But the prosaic truth is that, against Clinton, none of those people would win the Democratic nomination, and none of them would win the election.

With her centre-left policies, money and reach, she remains the best defence against an explicitly anti-science, anti-woman, anti-equality party, and the happy news is that she is more than a mere bulwark – she is good on those issues and getting better.

There is no such thing as a perfect political candidate, but Clinton is a very good one. The reason to vote for her isn’t because she’s a woman; it’s because she’s the best candidate for the US.