May I Please Speak to a Woman?

(How a major California agency refused to let me meet with a woman for almost 400 days)

A major California agency has not let me meet with a woman for going on 400 days.

I have been asking since Day 256.

I am in this time warp because I was raped by someone they license, and I reported him; stop licensing this dangerous person, I said.

I have been trying to get justice for over a year, but am stuck in a well, just below the surface of society, shouting upwards: Please help.

It’s not that no one hears me. They email you back, they say “we are looking into it,” they are “so sorry it happened” or they have simply “received your complaint.” The so-and-so is investigating, and the this-or-that welcomes your next report. Your passion atrophies or rages, as sad eye after sad eye meets you, unhappy to be drawn into your struggle.

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At one place, a familiar place and friendly, it still took months of talking to a man before finally, tired and ready for peace, I asked, “Who are the women in charge here? Can I speak to a woman?”

It helped immediately.

I told myself I would never forget it: how the ground shifted after I called the women into the room and said, “Please, you’ve got to help me. I’ll answer any question.” They knew the sound of panicked truth, but they asked good questions anyway. They had seen that life, knew what that kind of terror is made of. We looked each other in the eyes and didn’t look away.

“This never should have happened,” they said. “None of it.”

Never forget this, Carrie. Never forget it, I thought, as my grateful tears fell on a sesame seed bun.

---

Now, a new place, more formal.

Not familiar at all.

I must make this report on his turf, not mine.

For 255 days, I did everything exactly as asked, and then some, proving to any reasonable person that what I say happened, very likely did.

But every single person I spoke to was a man, and none of them seemed to take my situation seriously. I wondered, as I looked at their names and photos and titles, which of them had harmed someone, themselves. What kind of self-protective 3D glasses were these men in power using on me?

I had been in PTSD treatment a long time by then. I couldn’t leave the house for months, but things were improving by inches. Every time I learned that someone believed me — not just casually, but fully — and would fight for me, I felt safer on my block. And then my street. And finally, my neighborhood.

Yet every time I heard from The Agency, safety evaporated.

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Finally, tepidly, I asked for a woman.

In California – and in other states - there is a law intended to keep this from happening; intended to allow sex assault survivors access to advocates and investigators of the gender of their choosing. But unless a victim knows their rights, and demands them, those rights are not coming.

That is why I give you this essay. Because before this all happened to me, I might not have believed that agencies this powerful are really still ignoring assault victims, not offering them their basic rights, nor enforcing them, even in the most supposedly-woke state in the nation. But that is the situation. And if you are such a victim, it will be your sacred duty to fight on your own behalf, should you have it in you at all. It is likely the only way that things change.

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I first asked on November 11 2024, 256 days into my report.

256 days of exclusively dealing with men in the same business as my rapist.

Finally, exhausted, I asked.

They assured me a woman was involved, even if I could not reach her. They told me her name. That was it.

For 102 more days, I collected documents and begged for help.

When it didn’t work, I asked again:

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Six days later, I began to get snippy:

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Three days later:

I’m angry now:

And so I emailed her.

She did not reply.

I suspect she had never heard of me.

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April 4 2025.

379 days into my report, I cold emailed someone else:

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April 18, 2025.

Day 394.

Out of options, I wrote to the four remaining women on the board:

She told me she would have someone meeting with me.

I told her I would like an in-person meeting, and that I could go anywhere in a 163,696 square-mile state:

Ignoring my request completely, the executive director connects me with a local woman who still won’t meet with me in person.

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It is Day 398 and,

stalled between the 300s and the 400s, I wonder:

How hard will they make it

For two women

To look each other

In the un-delayed eye?

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There is no end to this story; it only goes on.

It goes on and on in my life,

and in the lives of millions of people who stay silent,

because admitting what they’ve endured

would mean turning their entire lives over,

like a mattress with only one more chance.

Nevertheless, we fight, no?

(Yes.)

And now, we highlight a dumb comment made on this very post by - and isn’t it often - a transphobic white man.

Thanks,

Larry Shell

, for participating.