Sinistralism
on being a weirdo, not a sicko
Dr [redacted] and my other health care providers,
I want to thank you for the care that you’ve provided me during these confusing years. I’d like to reiterate that while others around me have been worried by my behavior, I’ve been fine. Thank you for your patience as we try to work through what may be “wrong” with me.
I know that I have strongly resisted pathologizing my experience and while this has frustrated some of you, I hope that out of respect for my intelligence and long history of coping without medical intervention in my life, you will hear me out. I have a theory regarding my recent experience. It is not that there is something wrong with me that can be “corrected” through modern Western medicine, but rather that some aspect of my neural connectivity makes me especially resistant to conforming socially. You see, I am left-handed.
As medical professionals, you are inclined to see that many of my problems are based in the physiology of my body, and I am not discounting that; I am leaning into it. In my research across mammals, where a preference between sides can be discerned, it splits much closer to equal parity between left and right preferences.1[ ] However, since the Paleolithic Age less than 10% of the human population has been left-handed.2
I don’t think any of you are students of evolutionary biology, but I think an argument could be made that this extreme right handedness of our species is the result of extraordinary selection pressures.
I see the shadow of those selection pressures in my daily life in the simple tools of being a homeowner and caretaker of a family. I have struggled to effectively use our weed whacker because the ergonomics of it don’t align with my body. I had some difficulty using a hand-forged knife my husband purchased for our house. When we examined it closely, it has a warp with a right-bias. It appears that the knife’s craftsman checked if it was true by holding it in only his right hand on his right side. Lastly, my husband recently bought a specialized spatula modified to both scrape and lift. But this, too, has a right-hand bias built into the object; the flattened lifting edge is on the left-side, causing the user to move the tool from right to left, which is a pushing motion towards the midline of the body in the right hand, while in the left hand it’s a pulling motion away from the midline.
Right-handed spatula in question.
These biases of design in common tools occur in industrial tools, making manual labor and careers in construction come with a heightened risk of acute and cumulative injury for left-handed people. But the bias against left-handedness doesn’t end with tool design; there have been more overt, cultural pressures. In 2019, when geneticists discovered some of the genetic markers associated with left-handedness, they calculated that perhaps only 25% of left-handedness could be attributed to genetics, while the rest of the causality they attributed to “other factors.” “Other factors” encompasses a wide range of causal associations from fetal exposures to home environment. However, I think a key causal factor for left-handedness is societal pressure-or rather resistance to it.
As a species that generally exhibits bilateral symmetry as well as a dependency on tool use, many different cultures throughout history have both grouped individuals based on handedness and set one of these up as the better option, the other as the worse. And the worst option has often been to be left-handed. Indeed, it is from the Latin word for “left” that a modern synonym for evil is derived: sinister. And the English word for left derives from an Anglo-Saxon word that means “weak”. This confluence of influences has meant that just being left-handed was enough to be convicted of being a witch—and executed.
Other cultures from the Middle East to South Asia have retain notions about the hygienic nature of the right hand, while assigning tasks related to defecation to the left, and thus the left side—and left hand—are viewed as unclean. In China and South Korea, left-handedness is still seen as bad luck.
Just a mere hundreds of years ago, people spoke seriously about the increased criminality of left-handed people. These cultural biases across a variety of societies have disincentived children from being left-handed. And apparently, given the low rates of left-handedness and those vague “other factors” many people “choose” conformity. They choose to mirror those right-handers around them, facility with tools, ease of social situations, sitting at any spot at a table without insisting that they are left-handed and need room.
These pressures to choose in a false binary of handedness (even I, a person with extreme dominance of my left-side, still cut with my right hand and use a right-handed mouse) the better option, the one that nine out of 10 people choose. What does it say for the brains of people like me, who choose differently?
Here I must digress from my attempts to stay evidenced-based and delve into the imagination. I imagine myself, a young child, being instructed in how to eat with a fork and color with a crayon and being encouraged to use my right hand, the right choice. And I imagine myself, in my choice insisting that despite everyone using their right hand, the implied notion that left was less or worse, that there was a third option: it didn’t fucking matter.
Here is where we must return to the notions of evolutionary theory. Part of the great “genius” of our species is our incredibly cooperative nature. Individuals are very vulnerable on their own—to accidents that maim our fragile limbs or predation from animals further up in the food web. It’s only in groups that we are successful in reproducing. And these groups compete with other groups. In order for groups to be successful, though, there needs to be a shared sense of similarity. And one of the really easy way for this to happen is by everyone having the same handedness.
And that’s why all the moralizing across cultures, that left is bad, evil or wrong and right is, well, good and right. I’d even argue that the dichotomous division of the world in many religions between good and evil is an outgrowth of our bilateral symmetry. But then there are assholes like me, the ten percenters—the Sinistralists, let’s call them.
When I think back to little Auxie, choosing her handedness, I see her intuiting a third thing, beyond rightness or wrongness, this false duality in picking sides: I can be different than you, act differently than you and we can still belong together and be the same.
Of course, societies and groups of affiliation draw their lines arbitrarily of who is in and who is out. When I look at history and cultural movements, many times and in many other ways, there have been Sinistralists, unconcerned with doing what was expected. In fact, these ten percenters were often the vanguard of changing mores and innovation—and more, if they had power. People like Aristotle, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Napoleon Bonaparte, Simon Bolivar, Thomas Carlyle, Fredrich Nietzche, Marie Curie, Mark Twain, Mahatma Gandhi, Fidel Castro, James Baldwin, Jimi Hendrix, David Bowie, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Johnny Rotten, Oprah Winfrey, and Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few.
I have seen this in my own life—my history of being okay with being different, with being the foreigner and the weirdo. That in any population, a certain amount of people can feel both that they are a part of the group and be comfortable with being perceived that they are also not. They can mediate it. And the question I have for you, as we look back on your efforts of intervention to get my thinking “right”, who were we trying to soothe: me, the woman with “disordered” thinking; or you, uncomfortable because of my difference?
Of course, sometimes I think this difference I have, being okay being different–it just meant that people like me evolved to leave.
Sinistrally,
A. Ekster
Ströckens F, Güntürkün O, Ocklenburg S. Limb preferences in non-human vertebrates. Laterality. 2013;18(5):536-75. doi: 10.1080/1357650X.2012.723008. Epub 2012 Nov 20. PMID: 23167450.
Llaurens V, Raymond M, Faurie C. “Why are some people lefthanded? An evolutionary perspective.” Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2009; 364(1519):881–94. Also https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2666081/ Accessed 18 February 2024.