A Call to End Discrimination

 

You are probably wondering what I, a white dude living in America, know about discrimination.  Sadly, I know more than I wish I did.  You see, I was born with a particular trait that was destined to make my life in our society more difficult.  I have never tried to hide it and I'm not ashamed of it.  I'm proud of it in many respects, and many people around me already know this, but never, until now, have I publicly announced it.  So, here goes:  I am left-handed.

Obviously, the previous paragraph was tongue-in-cheek, and I in no way intend to marginalize the struggles of anyone facing discrimination for factors beyond their control.  Rather, it is the opposite.  I like to use humor to ease the tension serious topics.  This blog post is an attempt at empathy and solidarity on my part.  I'll let the reader draw the parallels between my seemingly minor inconveniences with being left-handed and their own experience with discrimination (or maybe with discriminating) based on race, gender, sexual orientation, height, etc.  And, if I can help call attention to and end left-handed discrimination, even better!

First, let's establish that left-hand discrimination is real.  

• Are left handers a minority?  
• Check.  About 8% of the population is left-handed.
• Is being left-handed beyond one's control?
• Check.  While the exact genetic mechanism that creates a dominant hand is unknown, studies do show hereditary influence on handedness.  While you could force born lefties into "reeducation" camps to learn to use their right hand, inside they will always know they are left-handed.
• Is being left-handed considered bad?
• Check.  Maybe you know this already, but the word "sinister" comes from Latin and means "left" or "on the left".  Similarly, "dexter" is the Latin word for right and is where we get words like "dexterous" from.  

There you have it- this situation is ripe for discrimination.  Luckily, society has progressed since the days when Latin was the language of choice and today it is not socially acceptable (in America at least) to openly hate on lefties.  However, there are still vestigial remnants of this bias that are pervasive in our society.  Here are some of the worst:

Handwriting

This was the bane of my childhood.  I remember one year in elementary school where I got straight A's except for a C in handwriting.  I even recognized at the time, that the deck was stacked against me.  In English, where we write from left to write, when you use your left hand, you smear the ink or pencil and end up with smudges all over your paper and your hand.  The only way to combat this is to rotate your paper to a crazy angle so you are almost writing down the page instead of across it.  Left handers who have mastered this have a unique backwards slant to their writing.  I think it's cool, but apparently others don't.  I never mastered it.  The stupid desks attached to the arms of the chairs in school are also set up for righties, so I never had an armrest for my left arm to stabilize it while writing.

Discrimination example:  Have you noticed how the new e-signing tools online let you select a pre-written signature to e-sign a doc with NEVER contain an example with a left-handed slant to them?  None of their options look anything like my real signature.

Then there is just the basic act of forming letters.  Cursive script flows for right handers where you are pulling the pen across the page.  For left handers you are pushing the pen which is much less smooth and not as natural.  

I, for one, am not mourning the imminent death of cursive.  They don't teach it in schools anymore and with the advent of electronic communications, it is not needed.  Now if I can get that C in handwriting expunged from my elementary school record, I will declare victory for the lefties! 

Pouring

The kitchen is full of sadness for lefties.  Measuring cups are the worst.  If you hold them in your right hand, they are fine.  If you hold them in your left, you get the inscrutable metric measurements that nobody can use.  Seriously!  I just googled European recipes to see if I could start cooking in metric and all the recipes still used cups and ounces and stuff.  I tried turning on my VPN and setting my location to a server in France, and it still gave me imperial units.  

So, cooking in metric is out.  The only alternative is to buy a left-handed measuring cup.  A search on Amazon only turned up a small number of viable options (and a bunch that weren't).  The best ones had imperial scales on BOTH sides so it could be used as easily by a righty as a lefty.  That seems like the right answer to avoid over cluttering the kitchen.  

More disheartening were some of the responses from other customers when somebody asks a question about whether the cup is left-handed.  Undoubtedly, all the sarcastic responses were from righties who don't have any clue that left handers struggle with this.  Nobody needs their unhelpful, uneducated opinion!  They are probably idiot product designers who create discriminatory crap in the first place.

Sweatpants

Maybe you see my point on measuring cups, but now you are wondering how can sweatpants be right or left-handed?   I'll give you the answer, but it is a bit of a journey, so stick with me!  With the pandemic and the rise of work-from-home, my wardrobe has migrated from primarily jeans to primarily sweats.  Yet I still resisted leaving the house in sweats and would have to change into jeans to go to the gas station or pick up the kids from friends' houses.  There were two primary reasons for this: the social acceptability of wearing sweats out and the ability of sweatpants to safely carry keys/wallet/phone.  

I've come to grips the social acceptability of wearing sweats to the store.  Times are changing, and I can change along with them.  So, I needed to do some shopping for sweats that look decent enough to wear out of the house and can hold my wallet keys and phone without having them fall out of loose pockets when I sit down.  This is when I discovered a new heinous scheme against lefties:  most sweatpants, if they have a back pocket at all, only provide one and it is on the right!  Left handers naturally put their wallet in the back left pocket, which is non-existent on 95% of the sweatpants I found.

I can claim no victory on this one.  I caved and bought sweatpants with a pocket on the back right, but with zippered front pockets.  My wallet will have to crowd into the front left pocket with my keys now.  At least the zipper will keep it from falling out.

Scissors

I've saved the topic that riles me up the most for last.  Scissors.  This is also a struggle right-handers have no experience with.  Scissors are very deliberately designed for right handers.  Even ones with plain, straight handles that look like they can be used in either hand are still right-handed.  The reason is the arrangement of the blades.  On most scissors the top handle that your thumb operates is on the left-hand side blade and your finger(s) operate the right-hand side blade.  If you use your right hand, the outward pressure on the thumb as you actuate the blade works against the pivot point and pushes the two blades together so you get a tight fit between the blades and a clean cut.  If you use your left hand to operate these scissors, the outward pressure on your thumb works through the pivot point to push the two blades apart resulting in a larger gap and no cut or unclean cut and makes it very difficult to use.

Left-Handed Example- note the blade arrangement compared to the image above:

Clearly there can be no universal design here that works for both lefties and righties.  There's no getting around it.  I need left-handed scissors.  In particular, I wanted some left-handed kitchen shears. This is where the discrimination comes in; there are almost no true left-handed kitchen shears out there on Amazon.  The very first item that came up on a search for left-handed kitchen shears was some right-handed shears claiming to be for left handers!  The picture clearly shows the right-hand blade arrangement.  In fact, there is only one true left-handed kitchen shear that shows up in the 146 results.  Shame on Amazon!  Get some AI into your search algorithms to show me only relevant stuff.  Shame on scissor manufacturers!  8% of 7 billion people is still an addressable market of over 500 million people.  There's money to be made there!  There's no excuse for not creating left-handed kitchen shears.  Incidentally, I tried to buy the one left-handed kitchen shear offered on Amazon.  Twice.  Both times it ended up being a scam seller and they never sent anything.

Conclusion

While left hand acceptance has made progress, there is still discrimination out there, particularly in product design.  Designers need to be aware of the needs of left handers.  We need to be vocal!  In my engineering job, I have memories burned in my brain of being schooled by my company's industrial design team on LED color selection and being sensitive to the needs of color-blind users.  That isn't something I had even considered until someone pointed it out to me.  I imagine the same is true for most designers- they haven't been enlightened on the needs of lefties.  (Side note: LED color selection on a product was always difficult even without taking color-blindness into account.  Every idiot in the company is capable of having an opinion on an LED color.  There's far less argument over whether to use 64b/66b encoding instead of 8b/10b for example because much fewer people are capable of having an opinion on that)

It's time to get loud and proud and demand left-handed consideration and turn some righties into allies!