When my brother grew up, he was a natural lefty. But you wouldn’t know that now. If you read his handwriting, you’ll see he writes very neatly with his right hand, much neater than I’ll ever write. He does most things with his right hand too — he can lift heavier dumbbells with his right than his left hand.
My brother is a righty now because my parents forced him to become one. He was born in China, and there was bad luck and significant social stigma associated with being a lefty. Above all, they didn’t want my brother having a harder time because he was a lefty. I never thought too much about it — of all the problems in this world, my brother changing his dominant hand didn’t phase me too much.
What I didn’t know, or really internalize, was that my brother was not the only one. Bias against left-handed people seems to be universal across the world. Hardyck and Petrinovich note in Psychological Bulletin that 90% of the world is right-handed. Being a left-handed person is, then, an inherent precursor to non-conformity.
There is still significant distrust and stigma of being a left-handed person in the world. Although America is generally tolerant of left-handed people, China claims to only have 1% of its students left-handed. To deviate that much from the world’s average is by no means a natural byproduct, but rather a means of forcing people to be right-handed.
Rose Eveleth at Smithsonian Magazine writes that two-thirds of the world still hates lefties. In China, a large part of why there aren’t many lefties is because many Chinese characters require your right hand to write correctly, and many switch dominant hands as a result.
But the stigma goes even farther than that. In many Muslim parts of the world, parts of Africa, and India, people who utilize their left hand are considered “dirty” and offensive. Even in the western world, there’s a stereotype that lefties are clumsier, and many daily use items simply aren’t design for lefties, like baseball gloves or scissors.
In language, according to Joe Pinsker at The Atlantic, being dexterous means being right-handed, while the word sinister goes back to the Latin word, sinistra, which means left. The research shows that lefties are disadvantaged as well — lefties score lower on cognitive tests and are 50% more likely to have learning disabilities and behavioral problems. Contrary to popular belief that lefties are more creative, lefties actually earn significantly less than right-handed people. In the U.S., their median earnings are about 10% less than righties.
The history goes back a lot farther, according to Lily Rothman at Time Magazine. In the Middle Ages, lefties were often accused of practicing witchcraft and being associated with the devil.
But lefties started to become drastically more integrated into American society because companies started making goods that catered to lefties.
What about people like my brother, however, who were forced to switch their dominant hand from left to right? It still happens today, and many see being a lefty as having an association with mental illness. And in some cultures, using your left hand is a sign of disrespect. Taylor Markarian notes that in Islamic countries, it is customary to shake hands and eat with your right hand. In Japan, being left-handed is seen as a bad omen for marriage.
Ultimately, I don’t know how much my brother thinks of being forced to switch from one hand to another. But I can imagine it wasn’t easy to switch his dominant hand. I can’t see whether he would still have been re-trained to be a lefty if he was raised today after presidents like Obama and Bill Clinton showed they were left-handed.
Existentially and beneath the surface-level topic of your dominant hand, my parents likely just realized my brother would have a much harder time in the world being an immigrant in a new country. They knew he was an immigrant. They knew he was Asian in a community that didn’t often accept Asians. They knew it was easier to conform than to be different, especially for someone like him.
Maybe changing his dominant hand was their form of control, and maybe not. But I know it was much more important to them than it was to me, and perhaps I’ll never know why.
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Originally published on January 15, 2021 on An Injustice!