Nature Vs. Nurture Argument.. Sun Jul 30 21:05:11 2000
The argument of Nature Vs. Nurture is used on almost everything these days, relating from sociology, psychology, to biology, etc. And for me to talk about all those issues at once would take me years, and it would make this posting extremely long. So to shorten the posting, I'm specifically going to talk about how sexuality is a mixture of nature and nurture.
Being the sociologist that I am (i.e. believing that we're influenced mostly by our society--environment), I used to think that a gay person or a lesbian person only chose to live that lifestyle because they were exposed to it. But now, I've changed my mind on that. I guess you can't specifically designate "nature" to one issue and "nurture" to the other. It's not as simple as people think it is, as I had thought of it to be as well.
The reason for me changing my mind is because I heard of that John/Joan case the other day on t.v. The case was about twins boys who were born, and while one of them was getting circumsized, the doctor accidently screwed up and there was no way to keep that twin boy a "boy". Doctors at Johns Hopkins decided to make that little boy a girl..and so started the life of this baby boy who was now surgically becoming a girl. Well as the story goes..the parents of this boy (now girl) raised him as a girl, and never told this girl that she was originally born a boy. But the weird part about this is that, all throughout the life of this girl (originally a boy), she always felt like a boy, she hated wearing dresses, she didn't understand why she had to take medicine all the time, while her twin brother didn't. So there came a time during this girls life when one day, the parents eventually told the girl she was actually born a boy, and that's when everything started to make sense for her. She started to understand why she loved to play with toy trucks and not dolls, why she hated wearing dresses, etc. Luckily, this former boy turned girl, finally became a boy again. But now he is given testosterone to make him look more masculine, since his body lacks the hormone (he was castrated).
I guess this case proved to me that somehow we are born as a girl and a boy and we know it, and not everything is based on what our society tells us to be. You can put pink clothing on a baby boy, and hey maybe that boy will still act "boyish" because somehow they are wired to act that way..it's not that by putting pink clothing on a boy you can make them "feminine"! (personally I find that blue for boys, pink for girls thing to be stupid--society screws us from the start!). I guess both nature and nurture makes us what we are....And that's what makes all this (Sociobiology) interesting!