Tag Archives: environment

Nature vs. Nurture

After watching the documentary and reflecting on your personal views, to what extent do you think gender identity is determined by the environment? 

Before watching the documentary about a boy who got turned into a girl, I was in the middle of the nature vs. nurture spectrum, but more towards nurture. I believed that the environment and our upbringing was what determined our gender identity. Not necessarily the colours we wore, but more of the people that we saw everyday and other things that we interacted with. However, after watching the documentary, I started to shift more over to the nature side. This is because in the video there was scientific proof shown by Dr.Swaab and Dr.Gorski’s research. They believed that your gender identity had to be determined by something else than the environment. They researched the brain for a long time, comparing the male and female brain; and eventually found that a specific part of the brain was twice the size in a male’s brain than a female’s brain. So to answer the question, I believe that gender identity is determined mostly by our genes.