I was discussing the recent wholly socially constructed rise of Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria among female children, and somebody pointed out the 19th century push to force left-handed children to be right-handed.
When you look back further in time you find that left handedness was constant throughout history save for a short period of time when we encouraged pupils to write with only their right hand pic.twitter.com/kDTl1CA21N
— RE-OPEN THE SIZZLERS (@SaladBarFan) December 14, 2022
For instance, Ronald Reagan was a natural lefty trained to be a righty, but all three candidates in the 1992 Presidential debate, Clinton, Bush, and Perot, took notes lefty. At some point, America underwent Lefty Liberation when we stopped persecuting lefties, but we never hear about it.
I’m guessing that left-handed baseball heroes, like Ty Cobb and, especially, Babe Ruth, played a big role in ending the early 20th century craze for forcing left-handers to be right-handed, but I’ve never read one thing on the history.
Left-hander Liberation sounds like an interesting bit of history, but there are no annual PBS specials about it because Lefties aren’t an official identity politics group, so nobody cares that somebody or other made the world a little better by getting people to stop pestering left-handed children.
My extremely vague impression from my Swiss-American father is that anti-left-handedness was kind of a thing among Germans, who were the world leaders in education, so their bad ideas spread along with their good ideas. But I don’t know that for sure.
