De Beauvoir Nature Vs Nurture

The topic of nature versus nurture has long been studied and argued. Back then, the answer to what is more dominant or influential is always the one or the other, but never both. Recent findings regarding human growth and development have shown that both nature and nurture play an important role in this development, as they influence each other. A person can be born intelligent as he or she inherits it from one of his or her parents through genetics, but this intelligence wouldn’t be enhanced to its maximum level if it won’t be nurtured through education. This same concept can be applied to our topic for this week, in which Truth argues that one is born a woman (nature) while de Beauvoir claims one becomes a woman (nurture). In her speech,

She has claimed throughout her work that “one is not born a woman, but becomes one”. De Beauvoir argues that female entities are shaped to become women. De Beauvoir also claimed that the term “feminine”, “women”, or “female” are just terms that are used to define the “masculine”, “men”, or “male”. This reminds me of our lecture from Systems of Power and Identity (Lecture 4) where the definition of “femininity” is only used to accentuate “masculinity”, or what de Beauvoir named as the “other”. One gender must be weak (feminine) in order to highlight how strong the other gender is (masculine). There was also a statement wherein women were stereotyped as unable to perform the tasks that men do as women “think with her glands”, which bring us back to the issue of Power and Political Women (Lecture 2) stating that women are not competent enough to lead a nation because their emotions make them think

Let’s take the transgender community as an example. If we look at it through biological definition, a woman is defined as an adult female, born with female genitalia. By this definition, a transgender woman is not a woman because she wasn’t born to be one. However, on nurture’s point of view, a person develops, learns, or feels that she is a woman. And by this distinction, a transgender woman is indeed a woman. Celebrities such as Laverne Cox and Caitlyn Jenner (formerly known as Bruce Jenner) are just some of the biggest examples that one can become a