Content warning: This letter discusses sexual assault, rape, and violence against women and girls.
The rage and grief of survivors live permanently in our bodies. We carry what the world asks us to forget.
We feel it in our bones. We know the particular weight of a story like this before we have even finished reading it. We know because we cannot forget. And society will not let us forget, even if we could. The institutions keep moving. The machinery keeps moving. The men keep moving through their lives, while survivors are left to live inside of what happened.
At Cornell, a young woman was drugged and raped by seven men. Fifty-seven men were in the group chat. Her lawsuit describes messages about her and what was happening to her. Two of the men were expelled. She left Cornell. Many of the others remained. Two years later, we are only now learning the full story because she filed a civil lawsuit.
I am a survivor of childhood sexual assault by a family member. It was reported to authorities. No investigation was completed. There were no consequences. Other survivors in our community know this feeling too. We heard it in Dolores Huerta’s story. We have watched Epstein survivors fight for years to be heard, while powerful men are protected. We know what it means to tell the truth and then watch the world keep moving.
Who gets to forget?
Who gets to keep their education? Their friends? Their reputation? Their future?
Jane Doe lost her education. The institution continued. The men continued. The machinery continued.
And where are the men, anyway?
Not the men who express outrage once the story is public. The men in the room. The men in the group chat. The friends who knew something was wrong. The men who could have risked their social standing, their comfort, their belonging.
Seven men. Fifty-seven people in a group chat. Where was the person willing to make his own social world smaller so that a woman’s life could remain hers?
This is where “not all men” fails us. We know it is not all men. The question is: where are the men willing to interrupt their comfort? Where are the men willing to risk something? Where are our allies?
And while we are asking those questions, we should ask why trans people have become such a convenient target for fear.
The people most committed to dismantling protections for trans people are not offering women and girls freedom from violence. They are offering us a scapegoat.
They tell us to fear the trans person in the bathroom, the trans student on the playing field, the trans person trying to live an ordinary life. Fear the drag queen reading stories to our children.
Meanwhile, the violence we know is real keeps happening: in bedrooms, fraternities, schools, families, workplaces, churches, hospitals, prisons, and institutions of every kind.
Boys are learning and celebrating hatred online. Women and gender expansive people are fighting for control over their own bodies. Institutions protect their reputations. Survivors carry the consequences. And Monday, the Department of Education formally reinstated the 2020 Title IX regulations, rolling back the Biden-era protections for LGBTQ+ students.
Many of the young people in our programs are just entering college. They should be entering a transformative and beautiful time in their lives. They should be discovering themselves, finding their people, falling in love, making art, changing their minds, staying out too late, making mistakes, learning what they believe and what they want.
Instead, they spend their time calculating risk. Who is in the room? Whom can I trust? How will I get home? What happens if I report? Will anyone believe me? And trans young people are being taught that their bodies are political battlegrounds.
What kind of future are we building when young people have to organize their lives around the possibility of violence?
The answer cannot be another scapegoat. We need to look at the machinery.
Who is being protected? Who is being sacrificed? Who gets to remain innocent? Who gets a future? And who is expected to rebuild a life after everyone else has moved on?
Our young people deserve better than a world organized around fear.
They deserve a world where their bodies belong to them. Where consent is ordinary. Where boys are taught that rejection is not humiliation and entitlement is not masculinity. Where trans youth are not turned into political targets. Where survivors do not have to sacrifice their education, their privacy, their careers, and their credibility to be taken seriously. Where institutions understand that protecting their reputation is not the same thing as protecting their students.
We sit in this grief today. And we also sit with rage.
Because outrage is not a feeling we can outsource to survivors. It is a responsibility we share.
We cannot keep asking women and girls to become experts in surviving systems that were built without their safety at the center.
We have to build something else. For our fellows. For our children. For the young people walking onto college campuses this fall. For every survivor who was told to move on. For every trans young person being told that their existence is the threat.
Our lives, our safety, our stories should be bigger than the violence we have normalized. Our futures should be bigger than our fear.
For the world we are burning, and what we are building in its place,
Torre Freeman, she/they
Director, Communications, Women’s Foundation California