Today the Cornell 7 case was reopened and the same morning, Trump’s Title IX rollback was made official. Nobody coordinated that and that’s what makes it worse. Some thoughts on Cornell, Title IX, and impunity here.
Sara Ahmed says that institutions do not fail to hear complaints; they are built to receive them in a way that ensures nothing changes, until the woman who complains becomes the problem to be managed. Kate Manne names this as himpathy, the reflex that grieves for the accused man’s future before it can see the woman he harmed. Cornell’s handling and Trump’s Title IX rules are the same reflex. One just writes it into a disciplinary file, the other into federal regulation. Abolition feminists have been telling us for decades that the state was never going to save us, that we keep petitioning the very structures that were designed to disbelieve. I don’t want these systems reformed. I want them burnt to the ground.