Crying is like a superpower and safety valve both. It allows your body to cope with stressful events or deal with heavy feelings. It gives you a sense of catharsis. Sure, you might end up with a headache after a bout of intense crying, but ultimately, you feel relieved to have let it out.
Every single time I felt like I couldn’t deal with a situation or literally anything, tears came to my rescue. I wasn’t much of a public crier for some reason, but in the privacy of my room, I would bawl, or in the presence of my loved ones as they tried to sooth me.
We’re in 2023 and it’s definitely too passé to claim “mard ko dard nahi hota“… Dard nahi hota tou dard pohonchate bhi nahi, shayad? Men who cry are looked down upon, but would we rather have men who suppress and misguide their feelings and insecurities?
What do you know so far? Let’s do a quick recap. You know what I think about crying, if I used to cry and men who can’t cry. Now, moving on…
While many men can’t and won’t cry because of the fact that they associate it with weakness or may have been shamed in the past because they were crying, I find myself in a particularly peculiar situation. I am a trans man who can’t cry and I am not the only one.
Even before I read up more on this online and heard from other trans men’s lived realities, I noticed a change in myself. I couldn’t cry. Not the way I used to, at least. Ever since I started taking testosterone (T) injections, the well of my tears has mostly dried up.
*Imagine two thug tears rolling down my cheek.* That’s the best I can do if I am really stressed and if (please excuse my French) I squeeze my eyes like one squeezes their anal sphincter when trying to expel a problematic turd.
Talking about problematic turds, after a I endured heartbreak for the second time from the same person, I sobbed for literally 2 minutes as I packed my suitcase. That’s it! Seriously? Surely, that deserves a longer lamenting period. By this point, it had been roughly 6-8 months since I started my T shots.
My “Prithvi waterworks private company limited” (PWPC LTD.), which once heeded my demands and offered me relief exclusively, is no longer what it was. I don’t want to make it sound like T deprives you of all emotions, especially the soft ones. I still feel raw and tender but my crying has taken a backseat.
It was when I was watching an episode of “L Word: Generation Q” on Hotstar, that I noticed a scene between two trans men who are talking about how it’s gotten tougher to cry, in a completely different context. I realised I haven’t seen too many trans masculine people talk about it so I thought I might offer my two cents.
The point I am trying to make is that taking T means you also have to be ready for changes in your emotional homeostasis. Not being able to cry doesn’t make a trans masculine or non-binary person who is taking T not caring. It doesn’t make them cold either.
Remember: the science of crying is complex and it is not as simple as saying that T = inhibition of tears. It is just one of the lesser-known hormonal side effect of sort and you can always learn to deal with your sad or stressful emotions in more ways than crying.