Crying Game

See also: crying game

English

Etymology

From the 1992 film The Crying Game, which features a scene in which a man discovers that his lover, implicitly presented up to that point as a cis woman, is in fact a pre-op/non-op trans woman.

Proper noun

Crying Game

1. (informal, often used attributively) A situation in which something or someone is revealed to be other than assumed/expected to be, particularly with regard to gender identity.
   • 2002, David Payton, I Dreamed I Killed Osama Bin Laden‎^[1], Trafford, →ISBN:

     Man, what a way to pop a balloon full of promise! It was like waiting to be with the girl of your dreams and you end up in the Crying Game.

   • 2004 September, “Hands on Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10”, in Maximum PC, page 15:

     We copped a feel of the technical beta of Microsoft's Windows Media Player 10, and beneath the slick new interface we found a Crying Game-scale surprise that has the potential to lure insatiable music grazers away from iTunes (which has now sold more than 100 million tracks).

   • 2015, Harlan Coben, Missing You‎^[2], Dutton, published 2014, →ISBN:

     “Fair enough. So you didn't know I was a man?”
     “I'd guess you'd call this my personal Crying Game moment.”

   • For more quotations using this term, see Citations:Crying Game.