Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and The Social Pressures of Adolescents

Teenage years can be a challenging time for many individuals. Beginning at the age of 11 through 20, adolescence is defined as a “transitional period in the human life span, linking childhood and adulthood” (Santrock 2009). At this point, the person is no longer a child, but not yet an adult. This makes it a very critical and sensitive time frame for identity formation.

One of Hollywood’s most typical scenes is contrasting men and women’s gatherings with their same-sex friends and discussing their partner’s behavior. It is easy to notice that while women tend to talk about their feelings, the same episode depicting men talk is less emotional and more logical. These stereotypes roughly reflect how gender differences works, which are actually not natural but rather nurtured. Personally, I believe that men’s fear to discuss their feelings is bewildering because ability to feel is one of key features that human nature. Yet, it is easily explained by gender stereotypes and the way men are brought up.

“Why fit in when you can stand out?” You have been told this your whole life. But whose responsibility is it to find out where you fit in, yours? Or your peers? Your adolescent years are all about trying to not stand out, and trying just as hard to fit in with the “in crowd.” You use more energy trying to “fit in,” instead of just spending all your energy on being who you really are. A group of friends are suppose to have things in common, but that is hard when everyone is putting up a fake persona. It is the student body’s responsibility to make sure that everyone has a place they can fit in and be themselves. People spend their whole lives trying to “fit in,” while the people who “stand out” are the ones who become something. Think

For a long time, men and women have been dealing with the controversy of gender roles. In modern day, the battle for gender equality has been more known. In the story “Guys Suffer from Oppressive Gender Roles Too”, the author Julie Zeilinger explains how males are held to a more macho standard, but do have prevalent emotions. If we were to let go of these rigid rules about what is manly, there would be no standard for any gender. If that was reality, men shouldn’t have to feel humiliated about staying home, and if their companion makes more money than they do. Zeilinger talks about how males detach themselves from some emotions, and live a “life nub to a true range of human emotion” so they can meet this masculinity standard. However if males

There is a perplexing gap between the understanding that babies are born with innate characteristics and the understanding that they inherit these characteristics from their parents. Besides, the puzzling gap between the understandings that a baby is born with inborn characteristics that they inherit from their parents (Harris, 2000).

Adolescence is a time of stressful transition for teenagers. They are straddling the fence between childhood and adulthood. Changes in their bodies, brains, thinking, values, friends, responsibilities and expectations cause events that are usually a time fraught with turbulence, for both the teen and their parents. This is a normal part of human development, and must be endured in order to come out the other side, hopefully well-adjusted, happy, healthy, and

One of the most trying and confusing periods in a person’s life is adolescences. The period of adolescence can be both thrilling and trying times in a one life. We experience a great deal of growth during this period. Adolescence is also a period where we begin to leave a childhood behind and take our first steps into adulthood. When we begin this journey into adulthood we begin to lose our some of our innocence.

What makes one individual different from the other? Many have attempted to answer this question- from ancient philosophers and theologists to modern day scientists. Regardless of whether the individual concerned is a cell or a whole organism, the answer is said to lie in the nature vs. nurture debate. Thus arose another, related question- How do individuals with extremely similar blueprints develop an astounding amount of differences? Biological research attempting to settle the debate for once and for all has found that differences amongst a cohort of individuals is established by an interplay of both- genetics (nature) and various environmental influences (nurture).

Not all heritable traits are going to be given to the offspring. Inheritable traits are traits later learned in life. Genetic tools such as Punnett squares, and pedigrees can help us determine the heritable genes. Some genes can skip an offspring and go to the next. It's normal to have different features from your parents but the same as your grandparents. Genetics are very important to learn and to know about.

Adolescence is a unique stage of life, where physical, emotional, and cognitive begin to change. It is the period, where they are more easily influenced, more exposed and more curious about different activities. It is the transition from childhood

From personality traits to promiscuous, or genes dictate how we look, how we live, how long we live, and how we behave in some instances. Additional vocabulary was incorporated into our bio-nebula of terms and definitions. We learned that DNA is a nucleic acid, a macromolecule that stores information, consisting of individual units called nucleotides, which consist of sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogen containing base. We identified the building blocks of the double helix, twisted ladder-like structure. We also learned that onions, salamanders and amoebas have significantly larger amounts of DNA in every cell. Transcription copies the code into mRNA. tRNA hold the code to interpret the mRNA code, into protein language. The Codon Table added about 20 new terms. Gene regulation, promoters, operators, regulatory genes, things are controlled in such a small

It stands to reason that sexual orientation, as a phenomenon that emerges both from social and biological factors, would influence physiological responses such as stress. While the social and biological aspects may be so intertwined as to be inseparable, it is definitely possible to test if LGBTQ individuals face more stress than others, and it may even be possible to determine if those stress reactions are due to social factors such as stigma or may have a biological antecedent. Justen et al. in Biological Psychiatry explored stress in people with different sexual orientations, using a cortisol methodology, and found that, contrary to their hypothesis, gay men were actually less likely than their straight male counterparts to show signs of

Adolescence is the transitional period in a persons life time that links childhood and adulthood. The factors that influence development during adolescence include genetic/biological and environmental/social. There are many developmental issues that take place during the transition from an adolescent to a young adult. The issues of emerging adulthood(18-25) are characterized by new experiences, experimentation, exploration as well as new developmental tasks.

It is possible to tell where one receives his physical traits from. One can look at a person, then at his parents, and see that he gets his brown hair from his father and blue eyes from his mother. There are other traits that people can receive from their parents that are not as easy to see. The idea that people can receive behavioral traits from one’s parents is the study of behavior genetics.

Genes build the phenotype of humans as well as the underlying genotype. Competition between cultural genes leads to varied success of genetic determinism. It can therefore be said that learnt traits such as those espoused within a specific culture, can produce what may seem to be the genetic genotype of an individual. Genes are not always advantageous in the