International Women’s Day Reminds Me of MyDark Truth: I Hate Being a Woman.

And my feelings have nothing to do with gender dysphoria.

CW: discussions of sexual assault, rape and suicide.

Ahh, International Women’s Day, the patronising, shallow nod towards “how far we’ve come”; the artificial highlighting of a few exceptional women whom nobody knew the name of until that article or Tweet existed, yet are supposedly as successful as men; the regurgitation of statistics about how many women are now in positions of political power around the world.

And yet, as I sit at my desk in the morning and look at my comments section, I find yet another fifteen new remarks from men calling me a “4/10”, “uggo” and “infertile”. One man felt compelled to comment on how, “for a deep thinker, she has fallen very short on life.” When I asked him to elaborate on what he meant by that, he commented on how it was because I was single.

Reader, first, I am not a single woman (he just assumed I was), and second, he felt compelled to comment about my relationship status on a video titled “5 Books That Will Change Your Life,” which included my recommendations of Plato, Hannah Arendt, and Nietzsche.

Despite being exceptionally privileged (white, straight, in higher education, and living in a developed nation), I am…