Nature/Nurture Metaphors

In my post on the utility of the term “cisgendered,” many of the comments revolved around the question of whether gender had any biological component or not.

I’ve always like what Robert Sapolsky says about this in “The Trouble with Testosterone” (where he debunks the idea that men’s violence is simply driven by their hormones alone; it’s from his essay collection, The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament):

You take that hoary old dichotomy between nature and nurture, between biological influences and environmental influences, between intrinsic factors and extrinsic ones, and, the vast majority of the times, regardless of which behavior you are thinking about and what underlying biology you are studying, the dichotomy is a sham. No biology. No environment. Just the interaction between the two.

Or more poetically, here’s how psychologist Vaughn Bell puts it at the blog Mind Hacks:

Nature versus nurture is a lie. Music is not melody versus rhythm, wine is not grapes versus alcohol and we are not environment versus genes. We are their sum, their product and their expression. They dance together and we are their performance, but neither is an adversary. The art of understanding this elegant ballet is complex and arcane but you may never realise this from reading the quoted results of genetic studies, because the extent to which a trait is heritable, that is, accounted for by genetics, is usually expressed as a simple percentage.

(The rest of the post is about schizophrenia, a topic not usually on my radar; a Facebook friend who studies the history of psychiatry pointed me to it.)

Bell is arguing against genetic determinism, but his metaphors also express – perhaps unscientifically, but I think truthfully – why radical social constructionism oversimplifies human experience. Obviously, social construction is very important to the content of gender roles. Why otherwise would we have such an elaborate system of rewards and penalties that induces conformity? How else could we account for the wide variation in gender roles through history and across cultures? But the existence of gender dysphoria indicates that biology can’t be entirely irrelevant, either.