An Open Letter to Betsy DeVos

Dear Mrs. DeVos,

If you had asked me before a few weeks ago to tell me anything about you - your job, interests, state of residence, or even your first name - I would not have known a single detail about you. President Elect Trump named you his choice for Secretary of Education, another controversial nominee in a long line of them. But like I said, I didn’t know you. I wanted to at least give you a chance; I wanted to hear you out.

Although I didn’t know you, you claim to know quite a bit about me. You have donated hundreds of millions of dollars to organizations that wish to electrocute the gay out of me, as you seem to know more about how my sexuality works than I do. You have long standing ties to right-wing Christian organizations that deny basic scientific facts about the origin of the universe and the development of life on Earth. While this may not be directly about me, it does pre-suppose a link to a God that you clearly believe screwed up somewhere along the line to make me gay, thus insinuating not only that humans and dinosaurs lived side by side for a period of time but that we are all literally the product of Adam and Eve and thus my sexuality is probably some kind of defect caused by millennia of inbreeding.

But perhaps the most outlandish and certainly the most presumptive claim on your part is that you are fit to dictate the path of colleges and universities across the United States when it comes to handling Title IX cases and sexual violence. You have asked me, a rape survivor, to place my faith in you that while it is “premature” to say exactly what you will do with Title IX in the future, that everything will turn out okay.

You cannot seriously believe that I would trust you. After all, you donated thousands of dollars to FIRE, a conservative organization which has been on the front lines of dismantling Title IX protections for survivors of rape and sexual assault under the pretense of fairness and equity. You supported multiple organizations which contest the very ability of transgender students to receive a fair education, both in primary and secondary schools. And your desire to move from an educational model which dismisses public education in favor of privatized, opt-out institutions threatens the mechanisms that hold those institutions accountable for protecting the most vulnerable students.

There is quite a record to suggest that many schools put financial incentive before the safety of their students. Any survivor who has interacted with their school’s Title IX office will either tell you horror stories, of dismissed stories, unfair hearing practices, and administrative neglect or success stories, of perpetrators who were removed and campuses that felt just a little bit safer. We are at a crucial moment in Title IX protections for survivors. More and more, schools are being held accountable for their (in)actions, and the Office of Civil Rights within the department you wish to lead is responsible for much of that. Without your support, the progress they have made could be reversed faster than it was made. Your silence, or at least casual disinterest, in these issues speaks volumes about your commitment to providing fair and equal educations for all.

Perhaps when you are as rich as you are, you have the luxury of buying an education that works for you. But too many in our country don’t have that luxury. We have all heard the controversy over Common Core, as schools around the nation struggle to adapt to more universalized methods of evaluation. Yet you yourself were unable to distinguish between proficiency and growth when questioned by Senator Franken. If you can’t determine the methods by which students should be measured, how will you ever understand or use metrics to hold billion-dollar higher educational institutions accountable for their actions?

There is some good news in all of this, although you might not see it as such. And that is that no matter who walks into the Department of Education with the new administration, we survivors will be there. Some of us have been doing this work since the 1970’s, and others for a few short weeks. But on the conviction of our experience, and spurred by the reality of our pain we will fight to protect those who come after us in the spirit of those who came before.

Please, hear this loud and clear: we are going nowhere. You will continue to endorse Title IX and the OCR in their efforts to end sexual violence in our schools. And if you don’t? Then we will organize, and advocate, and agitate until the shaky moral ground on which you claim to stand is eviscerated. Let this stand not as a warning, but as a statement of fact. We are going to put an end to this epidemic. If you’re going to help us, then fine. If not, get out of our way. We have a lot of work ahead of us.