Perhaps that’s the reason I felt Hillary’s loss on a physical level — like someone had actually delivered a blow to my body — and perhaps, too, it’s the reason that long-ago conversation with my grandfather came circling repeatedly into my mind the day after the election. Hillary Clinton’s victory would’ve in some measure healed the lifelong wounds that patriarchy has made on my heart. When people accused me of “voting with my vagina,” I laughed. I was proud to do it. President Hillary Clinton would’ve been repudiation, finally, of all those people who’d said women were not fit to lead (or vote or be doctors or write great books or . . . well, you fill in the blank). Her defeat was personal to me. This election wasn’t simply a political contest. It was a referendum on how much America still hates women.

I never have listened to her concession speech and I probably never will. I didn’t watch because I’ve already seen it: the woman who works fifty times harder than the man who got the job. It isn’t a story I don’t know. I’ve heard she was strong and dignified and inspiring. I’ve heard she rose to the humiliating occasion with astounding grace. None of that surprises me. Hillary Clinton grew up in the world I grew up in, only in one that was even harder for girls and women because she’s a generation older. She — like so many whose very humanity has been questioned because of race or sexuality or gender identity or physical ability — has had to make her way forward steeped in a culture that usually told her no. One that said: We will punish you if you try and we will applaud when you fail. And did.