I guess I tend to come down more on the nature side of nature vs. culture, but I definitely think that the possibilities you listed are entirely plausible and I'm definitely open to being convinced with well-designed, at-least-not-obviously-partisan studies.

(Amusingly, depending on what language you use, blaming "compiler bug" first when your program crashes can actually be surprisingly credible. Languages like D, for instance, which combine a strong type system with a homebrew backend overburdened with features, make it a lot more plausible than you'd think.)

I entirely agree that neither of those are existential struggles, but we still have to rank them. Personally, I'd rather lose feminist progress than liberal progress, because a liberal, open-minded society will make it a lot easier for feminism to regain ground. What good if we win equality-of-outcome, if it loses us the soul of equal rights? I believe that we ought to think that #3 if #3 is true, and that we ought to think that #2 if #2 is true. To do this, we have to be able to discern truth without bias.

Inasmuch as #3 is true, free thought and civil discourse is its ally in whole.