How does gender identity develop? What factors (cultural, social, peers, siblings, etc.) do parents need to focus on to ensure a healthy overall identity in their children? Take a few minutes and reflect on your middle childhood/early adolescence years. If you could go back in time and talk to that version of you, what would you say? Based on what you learned this week and your own personal experience, write a letter to the younger you. Keep in mind the developmental changes you were going through and give the younger you advice on school, peers, sports, family, etc.

If as a grown up woman now, I could talk to my younger version as a little girl, there are many things I would tell her about gender identity development, and what plays a really important role in it. The first, I believe, is nature itself, and the physical and mental characteristics that are a part of a human being and that make that person who they are, regardless of what anyone else says. Genetics, heredity, are unmistakably linked to the formation, at least correct formation, of identity, so it is a force that needs to be reckoned with and respected. The second, are both culture and society in general, first the parents, then the siblings, then the larger family group, then the friends, schoolmates, and all other people who somehow are linked to that younger person, and finally, culture and societal traditions.

For me, the identity as a woman came from my physical attributes, closely linked with the principles, parameters, and traditions that I was shown and taught as I grew up. I was always given this pride in my body as a female, without having to feel the desire at all to be a male at any time. My parents, played a central role, as I saw them each playing their tasks as a man, and a woman, and how these two roles intertwined in me to form my identity. Then, of course, came cultural perception, and society, the way that a woman is perceived in my society, what is expected of a woman, all those things were ingrained and complemented my genetical and hereditary self.

So I would tell my younger self, walk the path that you once did, be proud of what you are, what nature gave you and do not conform to what society wishes of you. But also, do not reject those roles that were once given to women, just because they are now seen as impositions of society. Being a wife, choosing to be one, has more to do with the heart, than the body or the mind, and being a mother, is probably one of the most wonderful events of all. That's what I would say.