To what extent do you think gender identity is determined by the environment?

There are many different opinions about whether gender is something genetically inherited or influenced upon the environment. Whether we’re biologically male or female, we can determine what we identify our gender with after birth. It depends on the influences we get from our surroundings as a baby and how the small actions that were occured in our lives shape us to become who we are. As a little kid, I wasn’t really given stereotype toys, my parents would give me stamps and art tools for me to play with and just let my imagination go, but I was still treated and raised like a girl so I guess that shaped me to correspond to the sex that I was assigned at birth. From the documentary “The boy who was turned into a girl” it mentions Dr money’s point of view where he came up with the ’theory of neutrality’. His theory was that babies were neutral at birth and the environment determined whether you would become a boy or a girl, meaning it could be possible to change a person from a boy to a girl or the other way around. On the other hand, Milton Diamond believed that our basic framework comes from biological sex and that our sex is already determined in our brains before we’re born. He was convinced that the power of our genes and hormones was so strong that no amount of nurturing could override them. The environment does play a big role to influence our ‘gender identity’ but I don’t think nurture will never be able to fully override the power of nature. Even if you change your gender identity from a young age (when you don’t know much), somewhere in your brain you will be reminded that biologically you were born the other sex. When I was younger I never exactly understood what ‘gender’ really meant, I thought it was something we were born with and stayed with us until we died. But my perspective has changed and I believe that gender is identity and that our gender can be influenced on what we surround ourselves with. Although nurture plays a huge role towards our gender identity, nature plays the same amount of importance. The way we act and our personalities is something nurture can shape but biologically nurture cannot fully change nature.

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One thought on “To what extent do you think gender identity is determined by the environment?

  1. A well constructed blog as you consider both your own perspectives on gender as defined by your upbringing and the different perspectives raised in the video about David Reiner. I like your description of the types of creative play that you did as a child – that probably helped you to have an open minded approach to gender stereotypes and roles.
    Ms Wilson

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