I completely agree with you about “the notion that once a person is socialized during childhood a particular way, nothing can ever change that initial conditioning”. To me that also seems such a limited and limiting understanding of humans. The idea that we are fixed and immutable, that no one can ever be changed or redeemed, can undergo a process of conversion or growth, later in life is so very… pessimistic for one. I deliberately used spiritual phrases there, because I do feel that the philosophies and politics that tend to this immutable nurture idea seem to me to replace biological determinism with a different kind, a materialistic (in a philosophical sense) determination that has little to do with how people really behave. Sometimes I think that what appeals to people about these kinds of deterministic models of people – even though they are ultimately anti progress and anti hope – is they are about fear of change. If change is impossible, it need not be feared perhaps? They are about absolutes and absolute knowledge, independant of evidence. They are about feeling safe in a world that is anything but fixed and immutable.

Well… so it feels to me at any rate.

On your other comments, I think one of the things that we suffer erasure over is the wide variety of ways we experience these things. I’m different again. I knew earlier, puberty or a little later, but transitioning was later, spending much more than a decade trying to deny and supress. The stereotypes are just that, but they are used to police our “realness” and to push us to conform. We are all as varied and various as any group of people and it’s good for us to assert it, without that making us “invalid”, no matter how scary that is for some, or how much that makes us real humans instead of dismissable walking cutouts for others.