Well, what a mess we’re in over here in Progressive Land. The infighting between Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren was hardly put to bed at Tuesday’s CNN presidential debate. The two most progressive candidates in the Democratic primary were pressed about their days-long disagreement, which started with a leaked script from the Sanders campaign that Warren said was being used to “trash” her and metastasized into a debate over a private 2018 conversation between them about whether a woman could defeat Donald Trump in 2020. (Warren claims that Sanders said as much; he denies doing so.)

The claws (and fangs…and daggers) have been out on Twitter for the past few days, with a rigorous debate now unfolding about the significance of their post-debate body language. At this point I only have one question: Is this really the best use of our time?

Not only is it possible that this entire ordeal has been intentionally blown out of proportion by the media and third parties who aren’t part of either campaign, but there are also much larger fish to fry. In the time we’re spending online trying to prove what Sanders did or didn’t do or what Warren should or shouldn’t have said, we could be talking to our Joe Biden–supporting relatives about how he’s not necessarily the most “electable” choice. We could be discussing why having self-funded billionaires in this race like Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer — who leveraged his deep pockets to earn a spot on the six-person debate stage — poses a problem. We could be taking any number of more productive actions to help Democrats defeat Trump and the GOP in November.

Personally, I don’t really care about the specifics of this private interaction between Warren and Sanders. There’s no way for us to know matter-of-factly who said what, and supporters are going to believe what they want to believe. People who love Warren will say she’s just telling the truth about a conversation she never sought to make public and was left in a bind as the only female front-runner; people who hate her will say she’s trying to resuscitate a campaign that’s struggled in recent months. People who love Bernie Sanders will say that Warren is lying and that Sanders has always been the major driver of progressive equality; people who hate him will say that sexism has always been an underlying part of his campaign and movement.

And all I can say is that I’m annoyed, because here we have two candidates with a lot to bring to the table, much more than the pile of indistinguishable moderate white men who are also in this race, and we’re fighting over the semantics of a conversation we’ll never have access to.

That doesn’t mean, however, that we should stop talking about the rampant sexism that many Americans don’t seem to want to acknowledge this election cycle. While the who, what, when, where, and why of the Sanders/Warren conversation isn’t necessarily important, the questions about identity, marginalization, and power are — as in, who actually has access to the White House. As I wrote in December, it’s not like Democrats are excused from misogyny; we have more than a few things to work on when it comes to bringing women into the fold.

At this point, Americans have gone blue in the face asking the question of whether a woman can win this presidential election; but the underlying question that seems to be on everyone’s lips is whether a woman can win any presidential election. These are the wrong questions to ask.