One form of sexism that particularly drives me crazy is a tendency among men to discount women’s emotions as purely hormonal. I hate that when a woman becomes legitimately upset over something, it’s considered entirely acceptable to ask her whether she’s PMSing. The troubling implication is that the woman’s emotions aren’t justified but are merely the result of hormonal levels in her body and need not be taken seriously.

I introduce this column with that paragraph because I’m about to talk about hormones and emotions and how entirely related they really are. No, hormones don’t cause women to be irrational all the time, and no, you have no right to ask a woman about her menstrual cycle just because she expresses emotion. But do hormones have an effect on emotions? Oh hell yes, they do, and trust me, I’d know.

I started and continue to take testosterone for the outward physical effects it has on my body. I love the facial hair, the chest hair, the low voice and the jaw line that testosterone bestows upon me. I knew that I was signing up for these changes. But T has also done really interesting things to my moods. I’d heard the stories, of course, of ‘roid rage and testosterone mood swings. Other trans guys described the initial transition period as much like puberty, with new emotions to get used to. Even so, though I expected intense emotions when I first started testosterone, it never occurred to me that the way I expressed emotion would change so much.

See, I used to be a major crier. I cried when I was sad and when I felt frustrated, ashamed, guilty or just plain angry. Crying didn’t always make me feel better but it helped a lot of the time. These days, I barely ever cry. When I’m particularly frustrated, a few tears may slide down my face, though they don’t begin to approximate the crocodile tears that I used to shed. When someone does wrong by me, I get angry. I feel myself tensing up and I want to relax, to release that emotion somehow, but I can’t. Even when I’m sad, the kind of sad that makes you want to curl up in a ball and just rock, I still cry very few actual tears.

I don’t want to suggest that hormones are all there is to emotion and men are controlled by raging testosterone. I’ll be the first to object when men use testosterone as an excuse for emotionally or physically abusive behavior. There is no excuse for getting into bar fights, mistreating a significant other or punching someone because they looked at you wrong. I hate that men are sometimes excused from these and other behaviors because they just can’t help falling prey to the power of their hormones.

Even so, after four years on testosterone, I can’t deny that hormones play a hugely important role in my own emotional functioning and it’s a trip to be living out my very own science experiment on a regular basis. I inject testosterone and three days later, my sex drive sky-rockets. When my body is low on T, towards the end of a cycle (the two week period between shots), I become melancholy and mellow. So you’ll excuse me for a moment, as I reflect on the fact that our bodies really are machines. Like computers, we plug in input and out comes a result. It’s not the same result every time, and certainly we have control over how we work with that result. But every two weeks, I inject emotion into my leg, and that’s been a pretty intense thing to realize.