Introduction

In the span of four weeks, five stories tested what the American feminist movement actually stands for. The answers did not line up.

On Sept. 4, a Massachusetts jury deadlocked in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, the Duxbury mother who strangled her three children. Hundreds of women had rallied outside the courthouse on her behalf. On Sept. 30, Tennessee tried and failed to execute Christa Pike, the only woman on its death row, after more than 100 organizations working to end violence against women asked the governor to spare her. Pike’s victim was a 19-year-old woman.

Three months earlier, the Supreme Court upheld state laws keeping transgender athletes off girls’ and women’s teams. Leading feminist organizations called it a defeat for women. And in September, a self-described feminist lawmaker in London defended a gender-segregated religious march she had attended. At Cornell, a lawsuit alleging a fraternity gang rape drew a national outcry and a special prosecutor.

Each story, on its own, has a defensible explanation. Taken together, they raise a fair question: is the movement applying one principle, or choosing a principle after it sees who is involved?

Background: Two Premises Under One Banner

Modern feminism rests on two ideas that usually travel together. The first is agency: women are full moral and legal actors, owed the same rights and the same accountability as men. The second is protection: women face structural disadvantages, from medical neglect to sexual violence, and those conditions deserve weight.

In simple terms, one premise says “treat women exactly like men.” The other says “account for what women face that men don’t.”

Most of the time, the two premises point the same way. The five cases below are where they split. The pattern worth examining is which premise advocates reached for, and whether the choice tracked a principle or a sympathy.

Case 1: The Clancy Mistrial

The facts were never in dispute. In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and 8-month-old Callan. The seven-week trial turned only on whether postpartum illness left her not criminally responsible (WBUR).

Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial on Sept. 4 after jurors deadlocked. The defense says the split was 11 to 1 in favor of a lack-of-responsibility finding; that count comes from defense characterization of jury notes, not a verdict (JURIST). The judge has since denied a defense motion for a not-guilty finding, and prosecutors have not said whether they will retry the case (ABC Australia).

The jury of nine women and three men deliberated for about 38 hours over seven days. The defense made a last-ditch appeal to the Supreme Judicial Court to remove the lone holdout, and a single justice denied it (ABC News). Plymouth County District Attorney Timothy Cruz said the evidence and the law supported first-degree murder charges.

Clancy survived her own suicide attempt that day and is paralyzed from the waist down. She remains in a state psychiatric hospital while the case is unresolved.

Outside the courthouse, hundreds of women gathered almost daily in support of Clancy and other mothers with postpartum disorders (Word In Black). Ms. Magazine framed the case as a failure of a health system that dismisses women’s symptoms.

Her husband, Patrick Clancy, has publicly stood by her. About 15,000 people donated more than $1 million to a fundraiser for him in the weeks after the deaths (Yahoo/Patriot Ledger). Critics were blunt. Conservative commentator Steven Crowder said the “feminist left” holds that women cannot be held accountable for anything (The Observer).

The consistency question. For decades, the movement has argued against the idea that pregnancy and motherhood impair women’s judgment. The Clancy defense rested on exactly that idea: that childbirth can produce a psychosis severe enough to erase responsibility for killing three children. Critics on the right called this the core contradiction.

Even some feminist voices noticed a selectivity problem, though a different one. One widely read feminist newsletter observed that Clancy, a nurse from an affluent suburb, drew crowds of supporters, while women of color prosecuted over stillbirths and miscarriages draw little attention. That is an inconsistency argument from inside the movement.

A Massachusetts comparison sharpens the point. Latarsha Sanders, who fatally stabbed her two children, also had postpartum psychosis raised in her case. She was convicted in 2022 (The Observer). Her case did not draw the national following Clancy’s has. If the principle is that postpartum psychosis can erase responsibility, it should have drawn the same attention for both women.

Case 2: Christa Pike and the Woman She Killed

In January 1995, Christa Pike, then 18, and two other teens lured 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, a Knoxville Job Corps classmate, to a remote part of the University of Tennessee agricultural campus and killed her (Death Penalty Information Center). Pike does not deny her guilt (NPR).

The crime was not a sudden fight. Prosecutors said Pike, jealous over her boyfriend, planned the attack with a friend. Slemmer was beaten, slashed and had a pentagram carved into her chest. Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti has said Pike carried a piece of Slemmer’s skull and showed it to friends as a trophy (AOL/Tennessean).

Pike’s boyfriend, Tadaryl Shipp, was 17, below Tennessee’s minimum age for a death sentence. Pike was the only one of the three charged with a capital crime.

Gov. Bill Lee denied clemency on Sept. 28. On Sept. 30, the state’s lethal injection failed; as of Oct. 2, Pike was unconscious and on a ventilator, and Lee had halted executions and ordered a third-party review (ABC News).

Pike would have been the first woman executed in Tennessee since 1820 (NPR). Women make up about 1% of U.S. executions since 1976. The Death Penalty Information Center says she is the first person known to survive receiving lethal injection drugs. Her lawyers say that in the hospital she repeatedly said how awful the attempt must have been for her victim’s mother (WSMV).

Before the execution date, more than 100 organizations and experts dedicated to ending violence against women urged the governor to commute Pike’s sentence (DPIC). Their case centered on Pike’s childhood of repeated rape and abuse, her age, and her later diagnoses of bipolar disorder and PTSD.

The consistency question. The victim was also a young woman. Slemmer’s mother, May Martinez, has spent three decades asking for the sentence to be carried out (PBS NewsHour). The movement’s defining message on violence against women has been to center the victim and believe her family. Here, the organized advocacy centered the perpetrator’s trauma.

Martinez witnessed the failed attempt and said her daughter did not get justice (AP via KBTX). Rita Morris, who knew Slemmer at Job Corps, described her as kind and said she had come to the program to earn a degree and help her sick mother (WBIR). The clemency campaign, by design, centered Pike’s story rather than Slemmer’s.

The obvious test: would the same coalition have mobilized for an 18-year-old man with an identical abuse history who tortured and killed a young woman? If yes, the position is about the death penalty and youth, and it is consistent. If not, it is about the perpetrator’s sex.

Case 3: Trans Athletes and the Supreme Court

On June 30, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J. that Idaho and West Virginia laws barring transgender athletes from girls’ and women’s teams violate neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause (Feminist Majority Foundation). The ruling permits such bans; it does not require them (ACLU).

The two plaintiffs were Lindsay Hecox, a transgender student who sought to try out for Boise State’s women’s track and cross-country teams, and B.P.J., a West Virginia transgender girl who had run on her school’s girls’ teams for three years (Feminist Majority Foundation; Equality Virginia). Published summaries of the majority opinion say it read “sex” in Title IX as biological sex as understood when the law was passed (RedState).

The Feminist Majority Foundation called the decision a blow. The Human Rights Campaign said it came “at the expense of all women and girls” (HRC).

On the other side, former West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, who signed the state’s Save Women’s Sports Act, called the ruling a big win for female athletes (WV coverage via Sen. Capito’s office). Lawyers for Hecox argued the opposite: that the laws enforce sex stereotypes and expose every female athlete to invasive scrutiny of her body (Wikipedia summary).

The consistency question. Title IX was the signature legal win of second-wave feminism. Its premise was that sex is a real category that justifies separate athletic opportunities. The movement’s largest institutions now argue that the same statute must not be read by sex alone.

That history matters. Before Title IX passed in 1972, girls’ sports programs were thin or absent at many schools. Separate teams were the mechanism that let women compete at all. When the movement’s flagship groups describe a sex-based line as a “blow” to women, they are rejecting the tool their predecessors fought for.

This case also shows the movement is not one movement. Gender-critical feminists, including some prominent former female athletes, backed the state laws. In simple terms, the inconsistency here is less a double standard than a civil war over who counts as a woman, and the largest organizations took one side.

Case 4: The Muslim Coalition Question

The fourth tension is coalition politics. In September, Labour MP Stella Creasy, who describes herself as a feminist, attended a Milad un-Nabi march in her North London constituency. When observers noted the women were separated, she replied that many religions hold separate events. Critics pointed out she had previously condemned a London club for refusing to admit women (Townhall, citing UK press).

Creasy followed up with a video of local Muslim women at the march, describing them as the community’s future optometrists, lawyers, accountants and surgeons. Her defenders saw a lawmaker respecting her constituents. Her critics saw a feminist applying one standard to a gentlemen’s club and another to a religious community that votes in her district.

The broader critique, made by groups such as the Middle East Forum, is that progressive coalitions now include religious-conservative partners whose positions on women’s roles the movement would condemn from any other source.

The consistency question. Gender segregation at a men’s club is discrimination; gender segregation at a religious march is diversity. Both can be argued. What is harder to argue is that they are the same principle.

The movement does police its boundaries when it chooses to. In March, the organizers of Paris’s International Women’s Day march asked police to bar Collectif Némésis, a far-right women’s group that calls itself feminist. An organizer said the group was “absolutely not” feminist and accused it of spreading hate against immigrants (Wikipedia summary). Exclusion on political grounds is available. Critics ask why the same scrutiny is rarely turned on religious partners with restrictive views of women’s roles.

The selectivity charge runs in other directions too. An April Al Jazeera opinion piece accused Western feminist institutions of loudly backing Iranian women against compulsory hijab in 2022, then going quiet as Iranian women died in the 2026 war. Iraqi women’s-rights activist Yanar Mohammed, who challenged extremist readings of Islam, was assassinated in Baghdad in March (Wikipedia summary).

Mohammed’s own career shows what is at stake. Her Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq ran shelters that served more than 800 women between 2003 and 2019. She received death threats for years over her challenges to extremist interpretations of Islam, and was shot outside her Baghdad home by two gunmen on motorcycles. She was a feminist working inside a Muslim-majority society, and her killing is the clearest reminder that the coalition question is not abstract.

Case 5: The Cornell 7

On Sept. 14, a former Cornell student identified as Jane Doe sued the university, its Chi Phi chapter and seven male students. She alleges they drugged and raped her at the fraternity house in October 2024, and that Cornell failed to protect her or punish them (Wikipedia summary). None of the seven has been criminally charged. Some have denied the allegations (The Conversation).

News reports say the men shared messages about the assault in a Snapchat group chat of about 50 people, encouraging others to join. No one in the group reported it to police (The Conversation). On Sept. 26, The Cornell Daily Sun published the names of the seven after what it described as a two-year investigation (Wikipedia summary). NexfinityNews is not naming them because none has been charged.

The Tompkins County district attorney originally declined to prosecute. His office said the Cornell police statement it received described her conduct as voluntary and consensual (Ithaca Voice). After the lawsuit, Gov. Kathy Hochul removed the DA, appointed a special prosecutor, and pledged to change the state law that makes rape hard to charge when intoxication is involved (CBC).

Cornell says its Title IX process produced expulsions and suspensions. It denies the lawsuit’s claim that the men were allowed to write essays instead of facing punishment (Snopes).

According to the lawsuit, Cornell’s Title IX office held at least 12 hearings in May 2025 before closing its investigation (Snopes). A university task force formed in 2025 reported that 35% of undergraduate women and 8% of undergraduate men said they had experienced sexual assault while at Cornell (NBC Chicago).

The backlash was immediate. Alumni urged each other to stop donating, some admitted students publicly turned down offers, and Cornell agreed to bring in outside lawyers to review how it handled the case (CBC; The Conversation).

The consistency question. Here the movement applied its core rule without hesitation: center the woman, believe her account, demand accountability from institutions. That response is what the movement exists to do.

The contrast is with Case 2. Jane Doe’s alleged attackers are men, and advocates rallied to her. Colleen Slemmer’s killer was a woman, and organized advocacy rallied to the killer. The victim-centered rule held in one case and gave way in the other. The variable that changed was the sex of the person who did the harm.

One caution cuts the other way. The seven men are accused, not convicted. Online campaigns have targeted their workplaces (CBC). A movement that asks for context and mercy for Clancy and Pike faces its own consistency test on due process for men who have not been charged.

The Case Against This Argument

Feminist writers have answers to each charge, and readers should weigh them.

Clancy. The insanity standard is sex-neutral. Recognizing that postpartum psychosis exists, at roughly 1 in 1,000 births, is a medical claim, not a claim that women as a class lack judgment (Ms. Magazine). Supporting a mistrial outcome is not the same as excusing the killings.
Pike. Opposing the death penalty for crimes committed at 18 is a consistent position that applies to men and women alike. Groups that fight violence against women may also argue that Pike’s own childhood rapes are part of the same pattern they oppose. Her male co-defendant was 17 and not eligible for death.
Trans athletes. Supporters of inclusion argue that sex-verification regimes subject all female athletes to scrutiny, and that the principle is consistent anti-discrimination, not a reversal of Title IX.
Coalitions. Respecting a voluntary religious practice is different from a club excluding women from professional networking. Many Muslim women describe their own activism as feminist, working within their faith rather than against it.
Cornell vs. Pike. Defenders would say the difference is not the perpetrator’s sex but the remedy: advocates want the Cornell case investigated and tried, and oppose only the death penalty for Pike. Both positions can center a victim.

The strongest version of the rebuttal is that “feminism” is not a single organization with a single line. Any broad movement will look inconsistent if you sample its loudest voices on different days.

Analysis

Each rebuttal works on its own. The problem is the pattern across all five.

In Clancy and Pike, the movement’s institutions reached for the protection premise: context, trauma, illness. In both cases, the women harmed by the defendant, three children and a 19-year-old classmate, got less advocacy than the defendant did. On trans athletes, the institutions dropped the sex-based premise that built Title IX. On coalitions, a standard applied to a London men’s club was set aside for a religious partner. At Cornell, where the accused are men, the victim-centered rule returned at full strength.

The common thread is not hostility to women. It is that the premise selected tends to match the movement’s political alliances of the moment. That is a credibility cost. A principle that bends to the identity of the people involved stops working as a principle.

Conclusion

Feminism’s founding claim was equal treatment under one set of rules. The 2026 test cases suggest the movement now runs two: accountability when it serves the cause, context when it serves the cause.

The fix is not to abandon compassion for Clancy or opposition to executing Pike. It is to state the rule first, then apply it to everyone, including the victims who happen to be women too.

If you or someone you know is struggling, including with postpartum depression or psychosis, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. The National Maternal Mental Health Hotline is 1-833-852-6262 (1-833-TLC-MAMA).

Key Takeaways

The Clancy trial ended in a mistrial on Sept. 4; a retrial decision is pending.
Tennessee’s Sept. 30 attempt to execute Christa Pike failed; executions are paused pending review.
More than 100 anti-violence-against-women groups sought clemency for Pike, whose victim was a 19-year-old woman.
The Supreme Court upheld state trans-athlete bans 6-3 on June 30; major feminist groups opposed the ruling.
Across all five cases, including the Cornell 7 lawsuit (special prosecutor appointed, no charges filed), the movement shifted between “accountability” and “context” premises — and its defenders argue that reflects a diverse movement, not a double standard.

Sources

WBUR — https://www.wbur.org/news/2026/09/04/lindsay-clancy-murder-trial-verdict-massachusetts
JURIST — https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2026/09/eleven-jurors-no-verdict-what-the-lindsay-clancy-mistrial-decided/
ABC Australia — https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-02/lindsay-clancy-defence-not-guilty-evidence-denied-by-judge/107219536
ABC News — https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/live-updates/lindsay-clancy-trial-jurors-resume-deliberations/?id=136086599
Word In Black — https://wordinblack.com/2026/09/after-the-clancy-mistrial-postpartum-issues-get-a-fresh-look/
Ms. Magazine — https://msmagazine.com/2026/08/21/lindsay-clancy-trial-postpartum-psychosis-maternal-mental-health-hayden-panettiere/
Yahoo/Patriot Ledger — https://news.yahoo.com//prosecutor-lindsay-clancy-created-situation-210605647.html
The Observer — https://www.theobserver.media/national/after-the-clancy-mistrial-postpartum-issues-get-a-fresh-look-eb5b77ed
One widely read feminist newsletter — https://jessica.substack.com/p/lindsey-clancys-mistrial-feminism
Death Penalty Information Center — https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/christa-pike-requests-clemency-ahead-of-september-30-execution-date-experts-amicus-brief-points-to-substantial-risk-of-re-traumatization
NPR — https://www.npr.org/2026/09/29/g-s1-145408/tennessee-woman-execution
AOL/Tennessean — https://www.aol.com/news/tennessee-plans-rare-execution-woman-002201754.html