As Ali Gallagher, a white Hillary volunteer in Austin told The Washington Post’s Krissah Williams: “A friend of mine, a black man, said to me, ‘My ancestors came to this country in chains; I’m voting for Barack.’ I told him, ‘Well, my sisters came here in chains and on their periods; I’m voting for Hillary.’ ”

And there it is. This quote from Maureen Dowd’s column neatly packages the current liberal identity crisis into the nutshell it truly belongs in. Dowd begins by citing the distaste of female Obama-supporters for what they have deemed “shoulder pad feminism” rampant among female Clinton supporters. The Obama supporters feel that Clinton makes it seem “not fun” to be a woman and harps depressingly on women’s historical victimization. Dowd notes:

As it turns out, making history is actually a way of being imprisoned by history. It’s all about the past.

The observation rings only too true in the face of this mother of all grudge-matches. However, the language of the anti-misogyny vs. anti-racism debate has seemed to have as much to do with biology as with history on the anti-misogynist side. Ali Gallagher did not choose to say simply “also in chains.” She did not choose to say “in chains and still subjugated by the men in chains beside them.” She chose to say “in chains and on their periods” and by so doing she intimated first that the mere fact of female biology is a hurdle that Clinton must overcome, and second that the mere fact of shared biology should be enough to motivate women to support Clinton.

Though the assertion is by no means provable, it seems that Clinton herself and many of her advisers and supporters feel that the fact of her gender is the issue at hand. They seem partially to labor under the great myth that there somewhere exists a tribe of American woman-haters out to disparage Clinton because she has two x chromosomes, regardless of the fact that 6 out of 10 Democratic primary voters are women. The short hair, the boxy suits, the line about earning her wrinkles: it all adds up. It could be said that the short hair and the boxy suits are utilitarian or a matter of taste, and that she has to talk about her wrinkles because the world is talking about them, the same world that unjustly couldn’t care less about John McCain’s wrinkles. My sense, though, is that Clinton consciously effaces her femininity in order to appear stronger. By so doing, she relegates her gender to the status of a card to play, a reason to cry discrimination, and that is a disservice to all women.

Much of the gendered criticism hurled at Clinton would not apply to many other women in politics because Clinton knowingly chose an extremely gendered path to national power. Her “35 years of change” encompass less than 8 as an elected official. She is attempting to parlay the entirely gender-specific role of First Lady into the experience necessary to be president and is thus inviting gender-specific criticism. Despite Clinton’s lamentations about the “women need not apply” culture of her young adult life, her political career needn’t have shaped up as it did. Speaker Pelosi, for example, is the highest-ranking woman in the history of the United States government and I couldn’t tell you what her husband’s name is. Pelosi grew up in an extremely political family and followed in her father’s footsteps as a member of Congress. Perhaps she would never have been elected had this not been the case, but she hasn’t let her father’s legacy overwhelm her public image and has surpassed the level of influence he had. She also manages to assert her femininity without weakening her position as a titan of the Beltway. America has even seen her in (gasp) a skirt suit or two and lived to tell the tale.

The fact of Clinton’s gender is not the issue at stake, but rather her treatment of it is. Her trouble does not stem from being a woman in politics but from being the woman-behind-the-man transformed into a politician by all appearances reluctantly female. Clinton has managed neither to have a career sufficiently impressive on its own un-gendered merits to qualify her to be president, nor to embrace her femininity as something other than an electoral handicap or a crutch. These facts and not the fact of her gender are what hinders her as a woman running for president. This reality and not a history of misogyny is what turns many modern feminists away.

No matter what Gloria Steinem has to say, we are ready to be first humans and then women, very seldom victims and never mere products of our biology. We are ready to embrace or to view with neutrality our gender as we see fit, and to do it all fearlessly in skirt suits right on national TV.