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I have a fair sized description of how the process works and what I did to embrace nurture and deny nature. But nature won in the end. I just wish it had happened 30+ years before.
Culture is only powerful when it works with the grain of personality, when it goes against, unhappiness results. eg gayness keep to the Fen Causeway
Your description reminds me of several stories I've heard before and why I agree that nurture is not enough of an explanation. It just seems to me there is a dynamic process at work not a static one and biology by itself is not always that clear.
The unhappiness of gays seems mostly externally (i.e., socially) motivated. Nothing is 'mere'. — Richard P. Feynman
You remember being 18 months? That's spectacular! (My first memory is from when I was 26-27 months old, and nothing much self-conscious -- a boat trip on a river in then Yugoslavia.)
I have a fair sized description of how the process works and what I did to embrace nurture and deny nature. But nature won in the end.
To reiterate what I wrote, nature-nurture interaction can involve influences during babyhood, which lead to biological developments that stay with you for life (thus also limiting possibilities of further culturally-induced biological changes in later stages of development). On the other hand, you (still) like football and trains, two areas with rather strong gender imbalance, so maybe you did effect some later lasting changes in yourself, too.
A further point to make is that what is "manly" and "womanly" can on ocassion differ greatly between cultures. There is that African tribe (the Bororo?) in which it is young men who paint themselves, whose beauty concept involves perfect teeth, gracility and dance, and who perform in a beauty competition for the sturdy women to pick from among them. These men have a concept of manhood which compares to the concept of womanhood of a "cross-dresser" in Western culture, though in the first case it's nurture and in the second nature that seems dominant. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
He is more into Central to Southeastern European ethnography than anything beyond. I think I got to this myself even before he got to learn about it. *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
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