Repeal the 19th? Are you for real?

There’s a story a lot of men love to tell. It goes something like this: a good dad gets divorced, walks into family court ready to fight for his kids, and walks out with every other weekend and a child support bill because the system is rigged for moms.

I’m sure that happens to someone. But as a pattern? The data doesn’t back it up.

Here’s what we actually know. Somewhere around 80% of custodial parents in this country are mothers. That number has barely moved in over a decade. So yes, moms usually end up with the kids.

But here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud: most of those moms didn’t win anything. There was no battle. The overwhelming majority of custody arrangements are settled by agreement, long before a judge ever has to decide anything. In one of the biggest studies ever done on this, a Stanford project that followed more than 1,000 divorcing families, most mothers asked for primary custody of their kids. Most fathers didn’t ask for it at all. Only a small fraction of cases ever went to trial.

And honestly? That tracks. For generations, raising the kids has been Mom’s job and paying the bills has been Dad’s. When the marriage ends, a lot of families just keep running the same play. She keeps the kids because she always had the kids.

So when I hear that fathers are being “wronged” in custody battles, my first question is: what battles? There is no national data showing that fathers consistently fight for full custody and lose. None. The stats you see floating around about dads “winning” most of the time when they fight come from a handful of small, decades-old studies that counted joint custody as a win. And nothing I’ve found shows the reverse either, that dads are routinely asking for sole custody and getting shut down. The evidence for that story just isn’t there.

What I see instead is dads defaulting to shared custody or every other weekend, and I think a lot of them do it because they don’t want to be the sole parent. That’s my read, and I’d love for someone to show me data that says otherwise.

Then there’s the money. Among parents who are owed child support in this country, about a quarter get nothing. Not a late payment. Nothing. Fewer than half get the full amount they’re owed. The rest get some, but not all. And since roughly four out of five custodial parents are mothers, most of that unpaid support is money owed to women raising kids.

So here’s where I land. Mothers in this country are still carrying the bulk of raising children, physically and financially. And it isn’t because we’re “screwing” dads out of the chance to do it.

So Let’s Talk About My Brother

I didn’t pull this topic out of thin air. It started, like most bad days do, with a Facebook post.

My brother posted something about how women can take a man’s children from him and then force him to pay her every month for the privilege. The gist was that fathers are victims, mothers are villains, and child support is some kind of ransom.

You just read the first half of this post, so you already know how I feel about that. Moms aren’t ripping kids out of dads’ arms. Most dads are handing them over. And child support isn’t a payment to the mother for her “trauma.” It’s money for the kids. It buys shoes and school lunches and the electric bill that keeps the lights on over their heads. The fact that about a quarter of the parents owed that money never see a dime of it should make every one of us furious. It should not make anyone feel sorry for the guy who isn’t paying.

The argument that followed isn’t worth repeating. It was long, it was ugly, and nobody changed their mind. But two things came out of it that I can’t let go of, and I refuse to just sit quietly with them.

Repeal the 19th

At some point in the conversation, my brother said we should repeal the 19th Amendment.

In case you slept through civics, that’s the one that gave women the right to vote. Women fought for it for more than 70 years. They marched, they were jailed, they were force-fed in prison when they went on hunger strike. It was ratified in 1920. My grandmother’s mother was alive for a world where she didn’t get a say in who ran her country.

And in 2026, a man I love, a man who was raised in the same house of faith I was, thinks we should go back.

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know this isn’t the first time I’ve run into this. When I wrote about the Lindsay Clancy trial, I watched people online, men and women both, start calling for the repeal of the 19th because they decided a woman’s psychosis, and other women’s sympathy for her, proved women are too unstable to vote. One woman. One tragedy. And suddenly half the population should lose its voice.

Let’s apply that logic evenly, shall we? The overwhelming majority of violent crime in this country is committed by men. The overwhelming majority of murders. The overwhelming majority of rapes. By that standard, men should have lost the vote a long time ago. Nobody is arguing for that, because it’s insane. Punishing an entire sex for the actions of some of its members is insane. It was insane when it was aimed at men in that sentence, and it’s insane when it’s aimed at women in real life.

Here’s what “repeal the 19th” actually means when you strip away the edgy Facebook energy:

That’s it. That’s the whole sentence. There’s no version of that statement that comes from a man who sees women as equals.

Psychosis Is Not Testosterone

The second thing he said is the one that really made me see red.

He argued that women who support Lindsay Clancy being found not criminally responsible because of postpartum psychosis are using the same logic that would let a man say, “I had too much testosterone,” as an excuse for rape.

Let me explain why, slowly, because this comparison falls apart the second you look at it.

Psychosis is a medical emergency. It’s a break from reality. People in psychosis can hear voices that aren’t there, believe things that aren’t true, and lose the ability to understand what they’re doing or that it’s wrong. Postpartum psychosis is rare, affecting roughly one or two out of every thousand women who give birth, and it’s one of the most serious emergencies in psychiatry. That’s exactly why the law has a narrow standard for it. The question isn’t “was she having a hard time?” The question is whether a mental disease took away her ability to understand that what she was doing was wrong, or to stop herself.

Testosterone is a normal hormone. Every man has it. Every man who has ever lived has had it, and the vast majority of them have never raped anyone. Testosterone doesn’t make a man hallucinate. It doesn’t erase his understanding of right and wrong. It doesn’t make him unable to stop. A man who rapes knows exactly what he’s doing. He chooses it.

Those are not the same logic. They’re not even in the same universe.

And here’s the part that really gets me: I have never said psychosis should be a free pass for women only. I said the exact opposite. In my Clancy post, I said that the same compassion should apply to every person whose psychosis ends in tragedy, man or woman, mother or father. I believe that a man in true psychosis deserves treatment, not a prison cell, just as much as Lindsay does. That’s not a double standard. That’s the opposite of one. Being found not criminally responsible also doesn’t mean walking free. It means being committed to a psychiatric hospital, sometimes for the rest of your life. And the defense is rarely raised and even more rarely successful. Nobody is handing out get-out-of-jail-free cards here.

But you know who does benefit from the idea that men can’t help it?

The “too much testosterone” argument isn’t a comparison to psychosis. It’s the oldest excuse in the book. Boys will be boys. He couldn’t control himself. Look at what she was wearing. And honestly, it’s an insult to every good man out there, because it says men are animals who can’t be held responsible for their own bodies. I don’t believe that about men. I think men are fully capable of controlling themselves, which is exactly why I hold them responsible when they don’t.

Safe Men and Unsafe Men

This is where I keep landing.

Remember the cookies? If I hand you a plate of twelve cookies and tell you one of them is laced with arsenic, you don’t eat any of them. That’s why women choose the bear. Not because every man is dangerous, but because we can’t always tell which ones are until it’s too late.

So let me tell you what I’ve learned about telling them apart.

Safe men don’t need women to be smaller. They don’t feel threatened by a woman who votes, earns, speaks, or disagrees with them. They don’t treat women’s rights like a pie where every slice she gets is a slice taken from them.

Safe men take responsibility for their own behavior. They don’t blame hormones or exes or “the system” for choices they made. When they owe their kids, they pay. When their kids need them, they show up.

Safe men don’t look at a woman in a psychiatric crisis and see an opportunity to argue that all women are unstable. They see a human being who was failed.

And safe men speak up. This is the one that matters most. A safe man sees a post like my brother’s and says, “Bro, no.” Not in private. Not later. Right then.

Unsafe men are the other side of every one of those coins. They talk about women like property that was stolen from them. They reframe their own absence as victimhood. They want women to have fewer rights, fewer choices, and less of a voice, and they call it “tradition” or “just asking questions.” And maybe most dangerous of all, they excuse the violence of other men, because the excuse might come in handy someday.

I’m lucky. I’m married to one of the safest men I’ve ever known, and I was raised by one too. So I know they exist. I know what it looks like when a man chooses to be good. Which is exactly why I can’t pretend not to see it when a man chooses otherwise, even when that man is my own brother.

The Part I Didn’t See Coming

Here’s what you have to remember:

My brother isn’t just my brother. He’s my twin.

We shared a womb. We were adopted together. We grew up in the same house, under the same roof, listening to the same sermons from the same father. He’s the yin to my yang. He’s the person I call when I don’t want calm, I want ratchet. When I need someone to get mad with me instead of telling me to breathe. He’s my other half, and I’ve never known a version of this world without him in it.

And today I figured out that he’s not a safe man.

Read that again, because I’ve been reading it in my own head all day and it still doesn’t make sense.

I’ve spent this whole post talking about safe men and unsafe men, about the cookie with the arsenic, about why women choose the bear. And the whole time I was writing it, I was sitting with the fact that my brother is one of those men.

For most of my life, there were two men I knew, down to my bones, were safe. My dad and my brother. Then I met my husband, and that number became three. Three men I never had to wonder about. Three men I never had to watch, or measure, or keep one eye on.

Today that number is two.

I keep trying to make it fit. Maybe he didn’t mean it. Maybe he was just trolling. Maybe he’s just angry about something else and this is where it came out. But I’ve read his words enough times now to know that’s me negotiating with myself. A man who thinks women shouldn’t vote, who thinks child support is a punishment, who thinks a rapist and a woman in psychosis are running on the same logic? That’s not a bad day. That’s a worldview. And his worldview makes it pretty damn clear who he is.

I don’t think he’s a good man. If I’m being honest, and I promised you I always would be, I think he might be a bad one.

And I don’t know what to do with that.

I don’t know what this means for us. I don’t know if I can call him the next time I need someone to be ratchet with me, because I’m not sure I trust what’s underneath the ratchet anymore. I don’t know what it means for my daughter, and whether I’m comfortable with her being around a man who believes these things about women, about her. I don’t know what it means for our mom. I don’t know what it means for me.

And the part that scares me most? I don’t know what it means for how I see everything else. Because if I could be this wrong about him, the person I’ve known literally longer than I’ve known anyone, then what else have I gotten wrong?

It feels like somebody grabbed a loose thread on my life and pulled, and I’m standing here watching the whole damn sweater come apart in my hands.

I don’t have a neat ending for this. I don’t have a lesson or a bow or a call to action. I’m still in it. I’m grieving a person who isn’t gone, a version of my brother I’m realizing may have only ever existed in my head.