My doctor diagnosed me with stress after a seven-minute appointment and handed me a prescription for anxiety medication on the way out which would have been reasonable if I hadn’t come in describing pain that showed up on a cycle so predictable I’d been charting it for months. I sat in my car and stared at that prescription, this little piece of paper that meant he’d heard everything and still landed on my nerves as the culprit, and felt that specific kind of defeated that lives somewhere between humiliation and fury. Women absorb this experience so regularly it barely registers as outrageous anymore. We come in with documentation and leave with something for our anxiety, and somewhere on the drive home we start wondering if we described it wrong. Zahra Deljoui’s ‘Medical Misogyny’ is what it sounds like when a woman stops wondering that.
Zahra and Swedish producer Jonatan Bäckelie built something genuinely unsettling together on this track. The synths grind like a waiting room that never empties – cold and fluorescent in a way that makes your shoulders tense before she’s even opened her mouth. There’s a Nine Inch Nails quality to the whole framework but it doesn’t thrash or spiral outward the way NIN does. It coils. Zahra’s voice sits on top of all of it completely unfazed with a delivery so flat and controlled it reads almost clinical, and that restraint is doing more work than any amount of screaming could. The anger in this production is pressurized, building under every layer without ever releasing, which is kind of the whole damn point of what she’s describing.
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She opens on the experience of a medical procedure with brutal directness: “Knock me down / Stick it in / Another needle for my pain.” The clinical economy of those words inside this heavy, distorted production makes the whole thing visceral in a way that doesn’t let go. The dismissal that follows is even sharper. The track moves through the condescension of a routine appointment where your pain becomes an inconvenience: “Then you judge / Still no job? / Take a pill / Why are you here again?” Zahra delivers it with zero performance. Flat affect, full contempt. Shit, I’ve been in that exam room. Then the chant arrives and it’s the most grounded fury you’ll hear all year: “Turning me inside out, you call this women’s health / Ignoring 50% that you think don’t count.” Half the population, chronically undertreated, handed pamphlets about stress. That line has been accumulating for generations.
The chorus pulls back from the personal and goes cold, turning one woman’s exam room into a systemic indictment. “You base your research on white men / Does that mean our lives matter less than theirs” is a direct question with a documented answer that nobody in that doctor’s office ever says out loud. Then the declaration: “Medical misogyny / Another lamb to the slaughter / Medical misogyny / Its time to treat us like your daughters.” The chant format is doing real work here. Every repetition adds weight. Zahra’s delivery stays cold and that steadiness registers so much harder than screaming ever would.
Widening the lens in the second verse is where this gets even heavier. Zahra acknowledges her own position before going further: “Privilege / On my skin / Keeps me protected.” That clarity makes everything that follows more powerful. “In medicine / Black women / Are routinely neglected.” Straight fact, no softening. Then into the exhaustion of someone managing a body the system refuses to take seriously: “Popping pills for breakfast / From the kitchen shelf / Numbing this existence praying it will help.” That image is so goddamn heavy. Then: “Judging innocence and grading it on melanin / Doctors playing gods with girls lives in their hands.” That word, gods. The arrogance of it.
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Zahra is a British-Iranian artist who is openly queer and neurodivergent and her catalog reflects that identity in ways that feel personal rather than political. Her breakout single “Pink Moon” became the soundtrack to the National Autistic Society’s awareness campaign because it came from inside that experience. She’s been building a reputation for fearless storytelling since, the kind that connects with people who don’t usually see themselves reflected back in pop music. She wrote ‘Medical Misogyny’ the same way she writes everything, pulling from lived experience rather than observation, drawing from her own history with endometriosis and procedures that left a mark, then pulling the camera back to address what the medical system does to Black women, where race compounds everything the first verse already described. She dropped it March 6th, two days before International Women’s Day, and if you think that timing was accidental you haven’t been paying attention to how deliberately she moves.
Cold is the only word for the bridge: “Crocodile Tears / They’ve been here for years / But maybe you’re the problem.” That “maybe” is doing so much work. A quiet statement dropped into the room after everything that came before it and that restraint lands harder than anything else on the track. Zahra has been controlled and precise for the whole runtime and then she hands you that one word and walks out.
I still have that prescription somewhere. Never filled it. Never threw it away. Throwing it away would mean admitting the appointment was a dead end and part of me still wants it to have meant something. Women carry the hope into every appointment that this time the pain will be taken at face value instead of routed through our nerves and our stress levels and our anxiety. Zahra made a track for every woman still sitting with hers, still wondering if she described it wrong. She didn’t. She never did.
