Nature Overthrows Nurture

Nature Overthrows Nurture

Will nurture always undermine nature when raising a child to become something they are not? In the case of David Reimer we see a person thrown into an experiment of sex versus gender, and how he dealt with this growing up. I have come to find that a person's gender is so strongly influenced by their sex, that it cannot be changed.

Sex and gender are closely related in various ways, but these two terms have two different meanings in society today. Sex is related to a person in a physical aspect, where they are biologically differ from male to female. Gender on the other hand is where male and female are distinguished on the personal traits and social positions that members of society attribute to each. So while your sex is a biological fact for men and women, which is the same in any culture, what sex comes to mean in terms of your gender role as a male or female in society can be rather different cross culturally. The differences between the two terms are closely related in society and can be mistaken for each other. Some argue that they can be interchanged and a person brought up at a young enough age can be interchanged into either male or female.

A man by the name of David Reimer had a terrible accident as a child, as a routine circumcision operation went wrong and he lost his penis. A Dr.Money from Johns Hopkins University argued that a boy at an early enough stage in life could be raised as girl with no residual side effects. As David grew up he was raised as a girl in society, he was given dresses and taught to apply makeup. When David hit certain stages in his life he was not maturing like a normal girl would, the gender roles placed on him did not stick and he would act as a boy would. As David matured he started to get thick shoulders and become more like a young man, his twin brother, Brian, said that "the only difference between the two of them was he had long hair." Dr.Money had a different view, and published an article stating that the experiment was a success. The Reimer family was skeptical and eventually told David everything, and David went back to his true sex.

Sex is a biological way to determine wither or not you will be a man or a woman, this is what nature has decided. People have thought that it could be done to change nature by using a nurture method, but this is not the case. Taking the Reimer family as an example they had twin boys, one was raised as a boy, the other a girl. This experiment did not work with trying to change one of the boys into a girl, his sex was a part of him from birth. The nature vs. nurture theory soon fell through, as it was learned that it was in fact prenatal exposure to male hormones that would change a baby into a boy. With this new information it does not make sense to try and change a person from who they were born to be, and the boy David is now back to his original sex and portraying