Left-Handedness: Discrimination Against Lefties

¶ … Lefties for a Day! The most obvious distinction between being right vs. left-handed that I found was (unsurprisingly) with writing. I noticed that writing with a pen was much more difficult given that the pen was designed to respond to pressure from the right not the left. Writing in spiral notebooks and with loose-leaf folders also was more painful. Sitting in a desk designed for a righty was challenging when there were no available desks for left-handed people. Eventually, I resorted to just putting my notebook in my lap.

However, writing was not quite as uncomfortable as I anticipated because I am used to typing on a computer. Over the years, I have become fairly adept at using both hands to type. Typing is in many was a gross motor skill, versus the fine motor skill of printing or writing in cursive. If I were a younger student being 'graded' on my penmanship, I would have found writing a far greater challenge. Some things were very difficult to do because my non-dominant hand was very weak.

I found clipping my fingernails, pulling down a shade, or even opening up a door to be taxing on my left hand. Some activities I deliberately postponed because they would be too difficult for me, such as wrapping gifts (which would require extensive cutting and writing cards that had to 'look good'). Of course, an actual lefty would not have this luxury. Still, I think that this exercise was a better illustration of what life might be like with a disability or an injury rather than being left-handed.

Many people who are left-handed learn to cope extremely well and have even stronger left hands than the dominant hands of right-handed people. That is one of the reasons why there are so many great left-handed athletes and musicians (skills that require considerable manual dexterity). They must have at least a reasonably strong right hand to cope with a right-handed world and thus end up being more 'balanced' as a result. Instead, I tended to feel more clumsy and awkward because the disadvantage I was experiencing was relatively recent.

Most of my left-handed friends possess a degree of ambidextrousness that I as a righty do not. They can open jars, write, and accomplish fine motor skills with their right hand -- they simply prefer to use their left and using the right feels and looks slightly more unnatural. Still, the difficulties I experienced highlight why left-handed students tend to have poorer penmanship and often if they are forced to write on a piece of unlined paper the words tend to 'creep' to the right.

Of course, it is possible that early on in their school careers, lefties feel uncomfortable before they have learned to cope with being left-dominant in a right-dominant world. For example, I had an older relative who was left-handed and who was forced to change over from being left-handed to right-handed in terms of the way she wrote.

The process was uncomfortable and awkward for her, though, and she said that she never felt entirely comfortable writing with her right hand and thus always felt at a disadvantage to her naturally right-handed peers. Interestingly, by the end of the day I found it much easier to write with my left hand and use it for a variety of mundane tasks but I still felt a desire to use my right.

I found myself concentrating much more intently upon simple tasks rather than performing them as a matter of rote. The purpose of this exercise was to demonstrate how it feels when the world is set up for people who have a particular set of strengths in one direction but who are forced to use it in another way that they do not necessarily excel in: lefties are faced with constant reminders that the world they live in is set up for 'other people' and not for them.

I did not try to play sports during this experiment, but once again this is an area of life that some lefties have used to their advantage (the left-handed amongst us have often excelled at athletics because hitting left-handed throws the right-handed opponent off).

Seeing the world a different way can even be an advantage for artists (many artists are left-handed) despite the fact that the physical art supplies for a left-hander can be so difficult to manipulate! Being a left-handed person is not necessarily a disadvantage, given that there have been many famous.