Yes, testosterone affects crying.

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When it comes to how humans feel and express themselves, some people don’t want to admit that sex hormones matter. Other people don’t want to admit that society also matters. And there seem to be only two extremes — walk on eggshells about it, or scream about those who do.

The whole ‘men and emotions’ thing is a prime example. A very common anecdote is that testosterone makes it difficult to cry. We need to accept that this isn’t strictly anecdotal — it’s neurobiological, too. But what people tend to forget is that we’re talking about the physical threshold of crying — not the emotional one.

I suppose this is why people are often surprised when I tell them that testosterone therapy made me feel things more deeply, not less.

I can’t actually tell you much about my physical crying threshold, since I was so dissociated and stoic pre-testosterone (when my body’s dominant sex hormones were estrogen and progesterone) that I never felt enough about anything to want to cry in the first place. I was mostly a robotic spectator, caught in a sticky sort of brain fog — anxious sometimes, but never joyful, sorrowful, or genuinely affected. It was definitely useful for certain situations, but not a particularly poetic or human way to exist. In short, female sex hormone dominance was incorrect for my brain, so much so that it didn’t even feel like mine to begin with. (Feel free to gripe about me pulling that theory out of my…