Exhibit A: A Woman Who Will Not Diminish

Counsel, let the record reflect:
the objection is noted,
and the patriarchy is hereby overruled.

You enter every dialogue as though it were discovery,
flipping through her words
for inconsistencies you can weaponize.
You call it discourse—
but your tone reveals the truth:
you aren’t here to understand.
You’re here to win.

You wield “logic” like a gavel,
mistaking volume for validity,
certainty for competence.
Every statement you make is precedent
in the small courtroom of your own ego,
and every woman who refuses to defer
is immediately held in contempt.

When a man speaks sharply,
you call him incisive.
When a woman speaks clearly,
you call her emotional.

You know the vocabulary well—
loud, emotional, megaphone personality—
each term entered into evidence
with the intent to impeach credibility.
These are not descriptions;
they are instruments of invalidation,
used to discredit volume
that threatens your quiet power.

But the record will show:
what you call “too much”
is simply what unmuted womanhood sounds like.
What you deride as amplification
is only her clarity made audible.
And that, perhaps,
is the most tragic part of your testimony—
that you would rather pathologize her presence
than witness who she really is.

You mistake conviction for hysteria,
authority for insolence,
articulation for attack.
Your cross-examinations are not clever;
they are camouflage for the terror
that someone else might be right.

Men like you confuse correction with humiliation.
You rewrite the transcript of every exchange
until you are framed as the rational party,
the neutral arbiter of reason,
and she—
the footnote.

But here’s what you failed to anticipate:
she has read your case law.
She knows how the verdict is rigged,
how your jurisprudence depends on her restraint.
She no longer mistakes politeness for credibility.
She no longer mistakes your discomfort for authority.

Your closing argument is predictable:
that she talks too much,
that she feels too deeply,
that she dares to inhabit
the full breadth of her mind.
But this court is adjourned.
The gavel has splintered.
And your rhetoric—
all those high-sounding citations of superiority—
has been stricken from the record.

Because now, Counselor,
you are not the examiner.
You are Exhibit A—
evidence of a system afraid of its own obsolescence.

And she?
She is the new precedent.
Her voice the ruling.
Her intellect the law.

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