This paper reads Serene Khader’s book “Decolonizing Universalism” and the feminist “non-ideal universalism” it develops in terms of an important contribution to the debate on ideal and non-ideal political theory. Khader’s approach is “non-ideal” because, while it calls for the universal overcoming of sexist oppression, it does so in a context-sensitive, non-idealizing way. Khader accuses a “liberal-missionary” feminism of being too hegemonic, because of its use of overly ideal character – more precisely, because of its justice monism, its unjustified idealizations and its overly moralistic character. The way in which Khader links her critique of missionary feminism with more general concerns about theories of justice that are ‘too ideal’ is an original and convincing aspect of “Decolonizing Universalism”. Khader’s criticism of improper idealizations is particularly compelling. For example, missionary feminism tends to focus local and parochial forms of sexist oppression, but omits the global and imperial causes for sexist oppression. The paper also presents two criticisms of Khader’s book. First, it argues that it remains unclear which philosophical positions exactly Khader subsumes under the heading of a liberal “missionary feminism.” The targets of her critique seem to be popular positions from political and activist life, rather than philosophical positions or arguments. A second and more substantial criticism addresses the methodological structure of Khader’s own proposal. Khader defines sexist oppression in terms of group-specific nonfulfilment of basic human rights. This approach, however, does not capture all dimensions of sexist oppression – certain forms of disrespect, degradation or status harms are not in all cases reducible to instances of group-based human rights violations or underfulfilments. Take the example of a sexist society in which all of women’s basic human rights are fulfilled – but only because of marriages into patriarchic households. I believe that a right to non-domination must instead be considered in terms of a fundamental “meta-right” – grounding other rights, but not fully reducible to the violation of other basic human rights. Also note that Khader’s reduction of sexist oppression to group-specific human rights violations makes the question of how to overcome sexist oppression under non-ideal circumstances even more difficult to answer, because human rights play two distinct roles in that examination: on the one hand, they play the role of prima facie normative wrongs; on the other hand, they are needed to identify sexist oppression.