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We must absolutely BELIEVE ALL WOMEN (except for Lindsay Clancy when she says she did it)
Distinguished Fellow in Selective EpistemologyCenter for Progressive Consistency Studies
In an age of moral clarity, one principle has emerged as non-negotiable: Believe women. Not some women. Not women whose stories align with preferred narratives. All women. Always. The alternative is to invite doubt, which is functionally identical to violence.
This rule has served us well. When a woman reports harm, the only ethical response is immediate, unqualified acceptance. Investigation is secondary. Context is suspect. Motive is a tool of the patriarchy. We have trained ourselves, correctly, to treat female testimony as a kind of secular scripture—self-authenticating, beyond cross-examination, and certainly beyond the vulgar suggestion that a woman might ever misrepresent reality.
There is, however, one carefully carved exception.
Lindsay Clancy, the Massachusetts nurse who, by her own account and the physical evidence, strangled her three young children before attempting to end her own life, is not to be believed when she says she did it. Or rather, she is to be believed only in the most attenuated, medically refracted sense. The act itself must be reclassified as the inevitable expression of postpartum psychosis, a condition so powerful that it severs the ordinary connection between the speaker and her words. Her confession, her detailed recollection, her statements to investigators—these are not testimony. They are symptoms.
This distinction is rigorous and necessary. When a woman accuses, we believe her. When a woman confesses to killing her children, we believe the diagnosis that explains why her confession should not count as agency. The two positions are not in tension; they are complementary. One protects the vulnerable. The other protects the narrative from an inconvenient data point.
Critics will claim inconsistency. They will note that “believe women” appears to mean “believe women when their statements advance the correct politics, and pathologize them when their statements do not.” This is a category error. Consistency is not the highest value. Harm reduction is. And harm, in this framework, is defined as any outcome that might make the broader principle look less absolute.
We must therefore maintain the exception with precision. Clancy’s case is not evidence that women, like all human beings, are capable of both truth-telling and profound self-deception, of both victimhood and violence. It is evidence that certain forms of female violence require a specialized hermeneutic in which the perpetrator’s own words are treated as unreliable precisely because they are so damning. To take her at her word would be to suggest that maternal instinct is not inviolable, that psychiatric labels do not always dissolve responsibility, and that the slogan itself has limits. Those suggestions cannot be allowed to stand.
So let us restate the rule clearly, for the record:
Believe all women.
Except Lindsay Clancy, when she says she did it.
In that instance, believe the experts who explain why she could not have meant what she said.
This is not special pleading. This is sophistication.
Anything less would be to admit that slogans, like people, sometimes break under the weight of the facts they were never designed to carry. And that, of course, cannot be permitted.
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