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Biology

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The nature vs nurture discussion has been raging for decades now as to which has the greater influence over us, how we develop and particularly things like development of our gender identities. There is no disputing that neither side is solely responsible for our development, but in my opinion biology is a stronger factor than social interaction and influence.

There are examples everyday of people who have been affected by their biological makeup, and have then had to adjust because of societies influence. The initial spark from all these things invariably comes from biology at some point however.
Some people will tell you that gender roles are learned by watching other people close to us and adults (particularly our parents) and then adopting similar habits and character roles as they seem to be portraying.

While this is true to an extent there are plenty of cases where people turn out completely different than their role models or parents that they observed from an early age growing up. An example of this would be hermaphrodites, (people of both genders due to some malformation before birth or a hormonal imbalance). If society played the greatest role in our gender development, then these people would surely just adopt whichever gender had been most strongly influential in their lives, whereas in reality many of them remain ambiguous and between the sexes because they have trouble identifying with one or the other.

Other examples would be people that feel as though they are trapped in the other genders body and have sex changes later in life, despite coming from normal family backgrounds. There is clearly no lack of normal reinforcement of gender roles that they would normally be taking, and yet they don't accept them as most people would, suggesting that biology and hormones are more of a factor in determining who we are that social interaction and influence.

Even supposing that some social factor made them decide this, then biology has made them predetermined to be more susceptible to this kind of thing, in the same way that some people are more likely to grow taller than or be resilient or susceptible to diseases, biological factors are the predetermining force behind every aspect of our live in some way or another.

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