I don't profess to understand it in any but the broadest terms (Zoe's the rocket scientist, not me), but I have always found the manichean versions of nature vs nurture unpersuasive.
Gender identity must be to a greater extent innate, for the simple reason that we are primarily animals. Animals aren't just higher apes, they're the lowest mammals, gender identity is hard-coded in the same structures identified in birds, reptiles and fish. It's not just our lizard brain that tells us if we're male or female, it's older than that.
What nurture does is about learned gender roles. But gender roles can't trump identity. Oh, you can fake it, I did, but it doesn't make you happy. eg David Reimer
David Reimer (August 22, 1965 as Bruce Reimer - May 4, 2004) was a Canadian man who was born as a healthy boy, but was sexually reassigned and raised as female after his penis was accidentally destroyed during circumcision. Psychologist John Money oversaw the case and reported the reassignment as successful, as evidence that gender identity is primarily learned. Milton Diamond later reported that Reimer never identified as female, and that he began living as male at age 14. Reimer later went public with his story to discourage similar medical practices. He committed suicide at the age of 38.
This question was once considered to be an appropriate division of developmental influences, but since both types of factors are known to play such interacting roles in development, many modern psychologists consider the question naive - representing an outdated state of knowledge. The famous psychologist Donald Hebb is said to have once answered a journalist's question of "which, nature or nurture, contributes more to personality?" by asking in response, "which contributes more to the area of a rectangle, its length or its width?"
There is no reason why a mechanism cannot exist that allows a fluity in creatures for which it is a specifically beneficial adaptive behaviour, but generally it is a hard-coded situation because it is the mechanism that provides best results across populations. keep to the Fen Causeway
And the "hardcoding" can come from many places : tortoises' sex is decided by the temperature of the eggs' surrounding, not genes. There's no reason something that indeed is subjectively felt as a hardcoding could come from very early unconscious socialisation and education - and indeed have biochemical effects. The human brain is extremely malleable.
I wonder if those studies on biochemicals, etc..., have also been conducted in places where some sort of transgenderism are socially accepted and even mandated, like, if I remember correctly, some Pacific Islands ? Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
As I said, zoe goes into some of that, but a biological science with ongoing investigation into a phenomena is not yet in any position to make definitive statements. Preliminary findings suggest we think gender identity is coded here (points to primitive part of brain) and that in higher animals it seems to be hard coded (with specific exceptions). Beyond that, write to zoe.
I'm resistant to the idea of nurture hard-coding, simply because what little of what I've read of the literature (pop simplifications, I freely confess to not understanding the full-on stuff) suggests that this is not how the brain develops. Nurture can allow fluidity of gender role and behaviour, which may suit the class of gay men more than straight men in a conformist society.
However, the superficialities of transvestism etc are possibly nurture related (I genuinely don't know) and may be able to be adopted in some socieites. I can however tell you with considerable vehemence that transvestism was meaningless to me, it didn't scratch my itch and didn't address or reduce my inner distress.
However, regarding hard coding, I return to a point I made during an essay I wrote over a year ago; I felt physically and psychologically poisoned by testosterone; or rather the absence of oestrogen. Once I started taking oestrogen the pain melted away rather suddenly after 6 weeks. This was not something I expected as the pain of testosterone was "normalised" and was my expectation of how life felt, nor did I have any concept of wellness until it went away, so the chance of a placebo affect is unlikely (I don't discount them entirely).
It is hard to imagine how such a response could be an encultured expectation. It was purely in my head, like somebody removed a nagging tooth.
But actually I've never seen anyone come up with a description of how being transgendered feels to someone who doesn't know, it's like trying to explain colour to a blind person. keep to the Fen Causeway
Our society also insists on real biological links with social phenomena - parenthood is only "real" if the child bears the genes of both parents, and people will go to impressive lengths to get such a "real" child. Maybe you needed more than transvestism for similar reason, because you can't feel as a woman without the physical attributes which are so important in our society (And then, probably you really needed those hormones).
I'm also thinking of the cases of the basketball players getting late, large growth spurts, in how encultured behavior could have very large physical effects. The intersection of the cultural and the physical is much larger than we often estimate ; and much of it remains unconscious. Maybe our "nurture", our competition friendly society, causes higher testosterone levels that make transgenderism hard, whereas Pacific cultures wouldn't cause such level of testosterone, particularly for someone raised as a girl...
Sometimes the localism of much of Neuroscience and Hormonal research (like much of experimental behavioral research) is depressing : it would be interesting if these sciences studied more that US college students and a few others... Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
I'm sorry. Ask Zoe, but I suspect she doesn't have a full answer either.
I go with hard coding of gender identity cos that's what medical science is so far suggesting and I go with what is described as the bi-modal bell curve model (twin peaks) for susceptibility to nurture.
I was hard codedfemale, I "know" that cos I has such a positive physiological reaction to oestrogen that the idea that it was nurture related seems ridiculous. Especially given how hard I work daily to deal with the nurtured aspects of my behaviour that remain undeniably and spirit crushingly masculine. I really do know the difference in the phenomena and I can assure you they are not the same. keep to the Fen Causeway
All but one case (Terry Wright in the UK) were TS before the change. Mr Wright has become TS as the result, poor guy.
thanks for correcting me keep to the Fen Causeway
