The Internet Would Like to Revoke Women’s Voting Rights

Nine female jurors are taking too long to convict Lindsay Clancy. Clearly, suffrage must suffer.

I have some unfortunate news: we have to talk about Lindsay Clancy again.

I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t want to write about the woman in the first place, let alone turn her into a recurring character. I have boundaries. Delicate sensibilities. Dozens of open tabs across multiple browsers.

Unfortunately, while I was attempting to move on with my life, “Repeal the 19th” started trending on X.

Yes, that 19th. As in the Amendment that decided women could be trusted near a ballot box. (Trending right beneath it: Gloria Steinem, dead at 92. My opinions around the feminist icon may have shifted dramatically over the years, but I’ll always appreciate cosmic irony.)

Apparently the Clancy trial has gone so spectacularly off the rails that a nontrivial number of Americans—including an alarming percentage who were assigned female at birth—are openly declaring that women no longer deserve the right to participate in democracy.

I’m not typically one to say “I told you so,” but I super extra bloody freaking told you so with a cherry on top and a commemorative plaque.

Earlier this week, as a spirited group of cheerleaders was staging an actual pep rally for a woman who admitted to murdering her children, I pointed out that insisting that motherhood sometimes turns us into hormonally hijacked drones incapable of moral discernment may not be doing the sisterhood any favors. I worried it would backfire.

It’s been less than 72 hours.

The repealers boldly believe—without having set foot in this particular courtroom or hearing even six seconds of testimony, mind you—that the Clancy case is cut and dried. They’re outraged that the nine women and three men (but mostly the nine women) sitting on that jury haven’t returned the Unquestionably Guilty AF verdict they ordered.

The thing is, those nine women (and three men) actually sat through the entire trial. They heard weeks of testimony. They saw mountains of evidence. And unlike the rest of us, they don’t get to casually declare that Lindsay Clancy absolutely premeditated the whole thing because they saw one convincing Instagram reel, or that she was obviously set up by her husband because he changed his undershirt the night of the murders.

They have to be sure.

REPEALERS: “These women are taking forever to convict her! Must be the hormones. Clearly they’re not fit to vote.”

ME: “If everyone could stop proving my point for five entire minutes, that’d be great.”

According to the internet, the appropriate punishment for nine women exercising an inconvenient amount of caution is to disenfranchise the other 130 million of us. You know, just like how we rounded up and arrested every Caucasian guy named Chad after an overwhelmingly white male jury acquitted four LAPD officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King.

Oh, wait. That didn’t happen. Maybe we could extend women the same courtesy.

Nick’s about to burst a blood vessel.

Here’s the part that appears to have escaped approximately the entire internet: the jury isn’t being asked to decide whether Lindsay Clancy killed her children. She’s already admitted that. Jurors have not been given a simple pop quiz: “Did she or did she not confess? Have you even been paying attention?”

(Trust me, I know that a confession isn’t proof of guilt; please see my entire Tyler Robinson Body of Work as evidence. And thanks to Michelle Herman, I went down the Patrick-actually-did-it rabbit hole yesterday and may never fully recover. But again, this jury’s job is not to look for alternate suspects. It’s to decide the fate of the one who confessed.)

(She was a nurse.)

The central question is whether Lindsay Clancy can be held legally responsible for the acts she admitted to. Jurors are weighing several possible verdicts, including murder, manslaughter, acquittal, and lack of criminal responsibility. In order to return a murder verdict, they must agree that the prosecution proved beyond a reasonable doubt that she understood what she was doing and knew it was wrong.

You may think the answer is obvious. The internet thinks the answer is obvious. But unlike the nine women and three men currently being held responsible for Lindsay Clancy’s fate as well as the collapse of female suffrage, the internet didn’t sit through six weeks of legal proceedings. @RogueLou18 certainly didn’t. But that’s not stopping her—yes, her—from entering her verdict into the public record.

RogueLou18 is a woman, FYI.

And now somehow, because a dozen insiders have taken longer than the average netizen considers appropriate to answer an extraordinarily narrow question about one woman’s mental state on one horrifying night three years ago, millions of American women are being told that the right to engage in political decision-making was a bridge too far.

That escalated efficiently.

Actually, maybe there could be an IQ test.

Perhaps the problem is semantics. Because Clancy’s official plea is not guilty by reason of insanity. With respect to our judicial system at large, how is that even on the menu? Anyone who kills their children is insane. Hard stop. How did we get to did the thing + crazy = not guilty? Where’s the guilty by reason of insanity option? Maybe the legal oxymoron is what’s holding the whole thing up. I could see that being a sticking point.

And while we’re at the rhetorical-question stage of this saga, can you imagine some dude on trial for—oh, I don’t know—sawing through his co-worker’s sternum and ripping out his heart during a fax machine spat? “Look, Bob just wasn’t himself that day. He’d been working around the clock, his testosterone was dangerously low, he might’ve popped a benzo or two at breakfast, and his wife was really badgering him about the basement remodel. What he needs right now is compassion.”

No, what Bob needs is an orange jumpsuit and a Bible. The end. (And what Bob surely doesn’t have is a men’s auxiliary marching outside the courthouse in matching WE HEART BOB hoodies. Wanna bet?)

Of course, it’s not just the jury that’s on trial here: because a subset of females has spent weeks publicly auditioning for the role of Lindsay Clancy’s emotional-support defense team, the conclusion becomes that women as a whole are too unstable for civic participation. Which is one hell of a class-action penalty, but here we are.

TRANS WOMEN: “On second thought, we’re actually men.”

The irony is that the Clancy fangirls practically gift-wrapped the case against women, arguing for weeks that we deserve special compassion due to the unfortunate fact that hormones, medications, anxiety, depression, and the relentless demands of motherhood can override the part of our brains responsible for not killing other people. And now, the very same “we can’t help it if we’re emotional” argument has folks volunteering to rewind the clock back to pre-Susan B. Anthony days.

If the goal was to weaponize our own biology against us, well done, ladies. No notes.

“I will never give up my right to vote,” wrote @honeyybomb on X. “But I still understand why people are screaming to repeal the 19th. If the murder of your own children can be treated as the predictable outcome of female emotion, the next argument is already written. Pedophiles could not help their urges. Violent men had trauma. Impulse becomes destiny and judgment becomes cruelty.”

Honeyybomb is not wrong.

I will never give up my right to vote, either. To the ladies of Kappa Kappa Clancy: if you’re fond of yours, you might consider retiring the argument that women are perfectly competent adults right up until we murder someone in a drug-induced hormonal rage. The rest of you can put the Constitution back where you found it.