I fucking hate it when men on Medium question my professional credentials.

Today was at least the fourth or fifth time this has happened. I write a piece making some arguments about some liberal stuff, and some dude looks at my profile and then writes a condescending response where he tries to “teach” me how to argue while explicitly saying he doubts that I am a real lawyer.

I mean, look at this bullshit from a couple of weeks ago:

Your arguments are worthless because you don’t share and/or acknowledge your biases or sources. If you are a lawyer, which I doubt at this point, I would put you in league with ambulance chasers. Your brand of feminism is the problem with Feminism. You are what makes Hillary Clinton unlikely to get support from intelligent men who have a real interest in equality for everyone, not just women. Good luck to you on your war path as you wage war against whatever paranoid delusion you are railling against. Oh, and before you go — don’t forget your pitchfork.

Or this one:

This is hardly the derogatory description which you implied is the norm in your post. If you really are a lawyer, you should know that cherry-picking is almost always counter-productive.

Or this one from earlier this week:

I hope you’re not a defense lawyer because you’re obviously not familiar with the concept of disparity of force. Two men against one or a man attacking a woman is a disparity of force that justifies using deadly force. A woman who is attacked by a man and in fear of death or great bodily harm will not be convicted by any court in the land.

Look, I engage in a fair amount of sarcastic mocking of other people’s arguments myself. As I have written recently, I consider it a completely legitimate strategy.

But saying you don’t believe I’m really a lawyer crosses a line. It’s not like these guys did their diligence and were unable to determine whether or not I’m a lawyer. I write under my real (very unusual) name, and am highly Google-able. It’s really really easy to see that I am in fact a lawyer. I mean, my name is on a brief to the Supreme Court filed last week in a highly-publicized case, for fuck’s sake!

My professional credentials — whether I am a lawyer, what kind of law I practice, where I went to law school — are entirely irrelevant to the conversations at hand. I have never “pulled rank” and demanded my arguments be given extra weight because I am a lawyer, or referred to my legal background at all on Medium except in my bio (with one exception).

No, it’s not that they don’t really believe I’m a lawyer. They are trying to belittle me by suggesting that I am unworthy of the professional title I put on my bio.

What is it about a woman with a professional title that makes these dudes lose their fucking minds?

When a woman disagrees with them, they do their best to reduce her to some ignorant bitch who they can either dismiss or “help” by teaching her the error of her ways. It’s so fucking insulting.

But more than that, it’s evidence of how men treat women who have opinions. We are uppity. We’ve forgotten our place in the world. We need to be slapped down, reminded of our inferiority, taught a lesson.

Fuck that.