The Role of Nature vs. Nurture in Gender Identity (Gpers)

Personally, I believe that both nature and nurture play a large role and contribute greatly to who we are but, nurture is of slightly higher importance to shaping an individual. Nature is everything that happens before and during birth, such as physical features. Whereas Nurture is the influence that our environment and experiences imposes on us.

The David Reimer case proves that nature is more important than nurture as they failed to change his gender through nurture as it lead back to his body realising that he is not what he was brought up to be. But, I think that it was just taken too far. It was on such a large scale. Although it was obvious that due to nature, he was brought to realisation that he was actually born a boy, I think that for most people, this won’t happen (switching genders) and in general most people become who they are by learning through how they are brought up and many other factors such as their wealth, race, gender, etc.

One example of nurture being more powerful is stereotypes. In a video, kids were instructed to draw a firefighter, surgeon and a fighter pilot. A total of 61 were men and 5 were women. The video also informed the audience that kids develop  stereotypes at ages 5-7. So, it shows that kids develop stereotypes and start developing ideas of how to act and such things at a young age and that sticks with them for their lives unless those thoughts/ideas are purposely changed to make them think otherwise.