Acculturation

Acculturation - cultural modification of an individual, group, or
people by adapting to or borrowing traits from another culture ;
also : a merging of cultures as a result of prolonged contact

I was studying about this concept today for my Abnormal Psychology
class. Essentially studies have shown that first generation Americans
from minority cultures such as Mexico that too strongly acculturate,
or in other words, adapt their native culture to that of the new
majority culture suffer from extremely higher rates of depression and
other mal-adaptive stress disorders.

Those individuals who maintain their original culture or become bi-
cultural (adapting to the new culture without losing their identity
with the original culture and its expectations), tend to be far better
adjusted living in the new culture.

Now consider this with me for a second.

Consider that being male and being female is like being in two
separate cultures. There is an identifiable male culture and specific
expectations as well as an identifiable female culture.

Say you are from one of these two cultures, but try to acculturate to
the other completely. Obviously, if the analogy holds, you would
potentially have an increased rate of depression and other mal-
adaptive stress disorders. Say however, that you do not give up your
original culture while living in the new culture. You have a far
better chance then to adjust to living healthily.

So to be blunt, those of us who are bio-males but identify as female
cultured, suffer from higher rates of depression when we attempt to
embrace male culture as we are expected to, but those who maintain
their original female culture while living as males, have a far better
chance to be healthy.

I cannot help but feel there is some truth to this. I have seen
evidence for this in both my life and the lives of other
transsexuals. Perhaps if, from an early age, we were not so compelled
to adjust our cultures' from female to male, our GID would not grow to
the significance it does later in life after a lifetime of mal-
adaptive behaviors. Now this might not apply to all proclaimed
transsexuals because some of them claim that they have always been
women and refuse to accept any environmental influences or factors
that may have affected their GID. I on the other hand believe in a
very powerful cultural and environmental influence that leads to GID
over-expressing itself regardless of its potential biological roots.
This acculturation theory seems to lend support to my ideas.