Elizabeth Warren Is Out. I’m Not Ready to Make Nice

Before she dropped out in August 2019, Kirsten Gillibrand tried this impossible balancing act, touting the races she had won as evidence that she could win. And over these last several months, Warren has had to dodge and reframe questions about how she would fare because of her gender. “The only people on this stage who have won every single election that they’ve been in are the women—Amy and me,” said Warren, referring to Amy Klobuchar (who dropped out last week). Women can win, she said, because we have won.

In the wake of that debate, memes with a picture of Warren that declared, “She’s electable if you fucking vote for her,” spread across the internet

But study after study confirms that more than any one fatal flaw, the mere fact of being a woman is the greatest barrier to success as a woman.

We’ve never seen a woman win the presidency, so we don’t believe a woman can. We have never seen a woman win because we’ve never let her. And we won’t let her win, because we don’t think she can.

At an event for undecided voters in January, I listened to a woman tell me that she was undecided because she liked Warren and Klobuchar, but she didn’t believe women had a chance. “Right now I have to decide if it’s going to be harder to see a woman lose the nomination or lose in the general election,” she said. She ended up caucusing for Pete Buttigieg.

So not this time. It’s just not our turn—again.

In September 2019, I co-moderated a forum on LGBTQ issues and asked Joe Biden about his record on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. “Well, aren’t you nice?” Biden said in response. Later, as we walked off the stage, he said, “Aren’t you a sweetheart?”

After Warren’s Super Tuesday defeat, a man left me a voicemail. He remembered what had happened at the forum. He wanted me to know he wasn’t sexist. “I just want to win,” he said. “You should want that too. So stop attacking Biden and get in line.”

I know what happened on the boat. And I do want to win. But I’m tired of a logic that asks me to take a backseat while a man leads. I’m tired of people who tell me to show up and do work for candidates who were never going to listen, who are willing to sell me out in order to compromise.

I’ll show up to the polls. As usual, men can count on women’s sucking it up and making the best of it, expecting sweethearts like me to get in line. We do and we will, because we don’t have better choices. Black women, in particular, do this in presidential race after presidential race, heading to the polls, voting in an era of disenfranchisement, only to see their issues and their candidacies erased. Only to see a disturbing number of white women vote for Trump.