By Kari Castor

I do not believe that Sen. Elizabeth Warren is a liar. I believe her, wholeheartedly, when she says that Sen. Bernie Sanders told her in a private conversation that he did not think a woman could win the presidency. I believe her because it’s the sort of thing people, even good liberal people, have said many times. I believe her because a woman has never won the presidency, and people are often skeptical of anything that has never happened before. I believe her because that’s the sort of thing women remember being told. I remember the boy in grade school who told me, when I arrived at school on Halloween wearing my jumpsuit and proton pack, that girls could not be Ghostbusters. I remember because it was important to me, because I wanted to be a Ghostbuster so badly, and I was shocked and upset that this classmate of mine believed that I couldn’t be one because I’d been born without a penis.

I also do not believe that Sen. Bernie Sanders is a sexist. Or rather, I don’t believe that he’s any more sexist than any other seventy-something-year-old white man—hell, probably less than most. I do believe that Bernie Sanders is an old white man who has, unavoidably, been impacted by the society that he lives in. It is impossible to grow up in a patriarchal society surrounded by institutionalized sexism and not internalize a sexist idea or two.

I believe that Bernie doesn’t remember saying that. I believe whatever he said, it probably didn’t seem that consequential to him. It wasn’t memorable for him, a person who was not going to have to overcome endemic sexism in his quest for the presidency. But of course it was memorable for her, a person who has faced and overcome endemic sexism her whole life. Of course it was memorable for a woman with presidential ambitions to hear her friend and colleague say that he believed the sexism was insurmountable for a woman seeking the presidency.

I do not believe that Bernie thinks a woman should not be president. If anyone were claiming that Bernie had said that a woman should not be president, that would be something to talk about. That would be something we need to fucking discuss, about whether we’re willing to accept a progressive candidate who doesn’t think that a woman should be able to hold the highest office in the land.

But that’s not the claim. The claim is that Bernie said he didn’t think a woman could win. And I believe he said that, and thought that, because no woman in history has ever won. The last woman who ran, a woman who was wildly qualified to hold the position in question, lost the presidency to an openly misogynist, racist grifter with a history of sexual assault and a pathological need to lie about everything. I mean, fuck, if 2016 didn’t make you wonder whether America is ready to elect a woman president, then you probably weren’t paying attention.

So if your defense of Bernie is, “Bernie would never say that,” then you’re lying to me or to yourself. Of course Bernie would have said that. Men who pride themselves on being woke have said exactly that to me or within my hearing. I think nearly everyone I know has at least whispered the question: Can a woman win? None of us know yet if the answer is yes. I hope, with every fiber of my being, that it is. But I don’t know. I don’t know if America is able yet to overcome the sexism in every fiber of its being and elect a woman.

Warren isn’t a liar, Bernie probably did say that, and it doesn’t make him the enemy. If there is an enemy, it’s the patriarchal society that has brought us to this point and denied us the certainty that of course a woman can be elected president.