Learned vs. innate - a discussion

Learned vs. innate - a discussion

A friend of mine, she decided to go for transition and is very happy now, asked me about what the source of my feelings are. Is it a learned behavior or innate? I think i mentioned it already. Yesterday evening she sent me a very impressive documentation about the psychologic basics and how psychologist deal with this.

Furthermore she asked me a lot of further questions about what i wrote and what i feel and this is so interesting.

But first of all i just want to tell you what happened the last two days.

I told you that i have the feeling that all this feelings are coming in waves and the waves are getting stronger and stronger from time to time. It is a very new experience for me and i really don't know how to deal with it. But i already have some ideas and i'm working on this.

I've contacted a self help group and they recommended a project, which takes care about transgender people. They offer a lot of services as make up, styling, how to move, talk and behave as a woman and they offer a weekend as a woman in may. This is such a great thing. I already wrote an email to them that i like to participate at this weekend. I really looking forward for this weekend and just live as a woman i want to be? I think this weekend will show what it means to be a woman all day long. Will i enjoy this? Is it really all what i am looking for so badly? What i daydreaming about?

And if it is really that i feel my woman in me so strong and do i have real problems to switch to my normal live as a man and i actually want to be a woman then i will go to a therapists and talk to her about this. I already found a specialized gender therapist near my home and i almost contacted her last weekend.

If i do not enjoy it (to be honest i do not think this will happen at all, i know me) then i think that the category of crossdreamer will be the correct definition for me.

But as everything in life nothing is only black or only white. It could be any stage within and then? What should i do then?

Right now my mood is changing from hour to hour sometimes everything is fine, sometimes i feel just bad about this and want to stop it right now and sometimes i just feeling ugly to be a man. Isn't it strange? Is it the normal process of finding the true identity?

But what does this means? I already wrote about this learned vs innate and now i just want to describe in my own words what is about.

The definition if innate is existing from birth, inborn. So usually if you are born as a woman you are female and if you are a man you are male. Quite easy to understand.

Learned means that behavior is learned from an external stimulus. In the way of transsexuality the assumption is that it was learned because of some circumstances, learned as a reaction of something happened in their environment. Then the psychology says if you can learn something it must be possible to unlearn it again. The result was that this can be cured by any therapy.

Psychologists continued to working on this and found out that it was not successful and so they started to analyze the patients and found out that they are healthy person and this behavior is caused by psychological reasons.

So the common understanding is that gender identity issues are not generally learned behavior, but some innate structure of the brain which these individuals are born with and must be coping behavior to deal with the inherent confusion it causes.

This is quite interesting. I think it is a combination of both, but i do have some doubts. It is obvious that because of hormones and other biological indicators in every man there a female parts as well in the opposite direction. So there are a lot of man having more female hormones than the average and does have female traits as well on the other hand there are woman having more male hormones than the average and so they are looking more than a man.

I just want to quote the asian theory of yin and yan as well as the theory of a human being could have more than one gender and the differentiation just between woman and man are just seeing black and white and not all the different grays beside.

Hmm what should i think about this? And does it explain my feelings?