Handedness seems pretty inconsequential compared to gender and sexuality, race, class, and myriad other anonymous identities with real stakes. Nobody cares if you’re left-handed—that had been my assumption, and that’s why I thought handedness would be a good toy problem.

Then again, I’m right-handed. Many other right-handed people taking the survey either minimized handedness, or in some cases, even failed to notice the existence of the left-handed. A 27-year-old man from Miami, Florida, for example, wrote only, “I am exclusively right-handed and so is everyone else I know.” Given the statistics (about one in 10 men are strictly left-handed at his age), this is hard to believe. In another typically blithe comment, a 58-year-old from Fort Lauderdale wrote, “Being right-hand dominant I often try to chuck a Frisbee with my left hand to improve skill. […] Otherwise, I never think about ‘handedness’. Good luck with your research!”

The left-handed are acutely aware of the asymmetry here: “It is more difficult than right-handed people realize to be a left-handed person.” ¹ At a purely practical level, many awkward scenarios were described concerning scissors, can openers, pots and measuring cups, desks, light switches, and, most of all, our writing system. It is a right-handed world, so we talk about “left-handed scissors” but not “right-handed scissors”: the majoritarian default again. For parents, educators, and numerous nuns, an understanding that “the left-handed curse is real” ² has motivated efforts to push left-handed children toward right-handedness.

Accommodating the left-handed properly is possible, but it takes thoughtfulness and resources. As a 34-year-old from Marietta, Georgia, put it,

I was ambidextrous as a child and was forced to learn to write with only my right hand. My writing was so sloppy that I had to take a special class. Eventually they gave up and put a computer in the classroom just for me, which was expensive and a big deal in the 80s!

This example illustrates how the “enlightened” treatment of left-handed kids was as much about evolving technology as about changing attitudes. The two go together. Technologies, even simple kinds like scissors and can openers, are a kind of prosthetic, and it takes either sophisticated design or large consumer markets (or both) to make these prosthetics work well for everybody. Until recently, most societies have followed something like the “80-20 rule,” the truism that often you can get a “good enough” solution to work 80% of the time (or for 80% of the population) with 20% of the effort it would take to solve the full problem.

In fact, 80-20 is often too optimistic, because there are so many combinations of minority and majority, and intersections of minorities have a fractal quality. How do we design a can opener that remains useful for a strictly left-handed person with low grip strength due to arthritis and severe cerebral palsy? Designers do sometimes think about such problems nowadays, but there are still too many “corner cases,” as they’re often called, to think through, to test, or to be compatible with making a profit. Regulation can help, but it, too, relies on something like a “marketplace” of advocacy for specific needs. It seems unlikely that the project of universal inclusion will ever be complete. But we can chip away at it.

The practical aspects of majoritarian “privilege” and minoritarian “curse” are far from the whole story, though. Beyond how you write or throw a Frisbee, handedness is an identity, which brings with it all of the social machinery of tribalism, in-groups, and out-groups. “Proud to be right-handed,” wrote a 36-year-old from Monmouth Junction, New Jersey. Or, “LEFTIES RULE,” according to a defiant 28-year-old from Hebron, Indiana.

However when a visible majority exists, and the world is set up to favor that majority, these “tribes” are unevenly matched. Social stigma inevitably ensues: per Wikipedia, ³ “the disapproval of, or discrimination against, a person based on perceivable social characteristics that serve to distinguish them from other members of a society.”

When I set out to explore handedness, I didn’t fully appreciate the way stigma follows inexorably from the social logic of majority and minority. Respondents’ comments were eye opening. They included many variations on “As a child I was told that doing things with my left hand was bad,” ⁴ as well as tropes familiar from other contexts, like “I don’t really believe in handedness” ⁵ and even “some of my best friends are left-handed.” ⁶ I didn’t know whether to laugh or wince at this last one. Was it meant ironically? An emoji might have helped, if so!

The Greek word “stigma,” dating back at least to the sixth century BCE, originally referred to the branding, tattooing, or cutting of symbols into the skins of slaves or criminals, to make it impossible for them to move through society without advertising their low status. Similar practices were documented in the colonial slave trade, two thousand years later. As Imogen Tyler writes in her 2020 book Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality,

Penal tattooing involved the inscription of words, symbols, and sometimes full sentences into the skin. These tattoos ‘usually consisted of the name of a crime’ inked into the face. Records of common stigmas include ‘Thief’ or ‘Stop me, I’m a runaway’, tattooed on the forehead. If you survived the torture of being tattooed (without antiseptic) you would never be free of the stigma, the ‘disgrace, humiliation and exclusion’ remaining ‘indelibly written on one’s face for all to see.’ ⁷

Hence these marks were never just about subordination or ownership, as in cattle branding (though the parallel with the treatment of livestock has always been clear, and highlights both the dehumanization of the act and the stark power inequality behind it). The tattoos were also ways of literally writing shame into the skin. They indelibly marked someone as blemished, morally polluted, and lesser than, in a way that would forever change the way that person was seen—both by others and, worse still, by themselves. It was why, during the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, Jewish women in Linz, Austria, were made to exhibit themselves in public with cardboard signs reading “I have been excluded from the national community [Volksgemeinschaft].” ⁸ It was why Jews were forced to wear yellow star of David badges in public, and were eventually tattooed on the arm with coded numbers in concentration camps.

In the past century, our understanding of stigma has broadened. While the word was originally associated with tattooing or otherwise permanently marking the skin, this practice is more the exception than the rule. Such a marking was “needed” by the ancient Greeks, because their slaves (and criminals) could be ethnically Greek too, making their subordinate status otherwise impossible to spot.

Similarly, despite Nazi pseudoscience and propaganda cartoons suggesting that Jewish faces were distinctive or even monstrous, it was often impossible to tell Jews and Christians apart based on bodies, clothes, languages, or behaviors. Plenty of “Aryans” had big noses, and plenty of Jews had blond hair. The same held for gay people, Gypsies, and other populations Nazi Germany sought to isolate and eliminate, despite these populations often not being well defined. These examples reveal how tattooing, branding, and other kinds of permanent physical marking are simply ancient technologies that an in-group may press into service to reinforce social categories, especially when the signs of belonging or exclusion are not otherwise obvious.

Today, stigma is no longer a sign per se, but the meaning behind it. That meaning—“your kind are inferior”—has attached to a wide range of out-groups throughout history, whether of race, caste, sexuality, culture, class, or much else—including, yes, handedness.

For evidence of the handedness stigma, one need only look to language itself—the words we use to identify the majority and the minority. Though they’ve lost their power, these words are like the eroded features of a dormant volcano. They hint at a violent past during which the stigma of handedness was more active than it is today.

Consider: the word “left” derives from the Anglo-Saxon word for “weak,” lyft, while riht meant “good, proper, fitting, straight.” “Right” of course still means something proper or correct, both in English and in many other languages. Remarkably, a similar pattern holds in languages unrelated to English: the Chinese word for right, 右 (yòu), also means “respect,” “esteem,” or “value,” ⁹ while the word for left, 左 (zuŏ), means “queer,” “unorthodox,” “wrong,” “devious,” “dishonest,” or historically, simply “inferior position.” ¹⁰

Dexter, the Latin for right, connotes skill and adroitness, as per the English word “dextrous.” In fact “ambidextrous,” skilled with both hands, literally means “having two right hands”! Compare this with sayings like having “two left feet,” which means being clumsy. The same expression works in a number of other languages too, as in the French deux pieds gauches. For that matter, gauche itself means not only “left” but also “awkward or lacking in social graces.” The Latin for left is sinistram, from which we derive “sinister.” ¹¹

In boxing, a right-handed fighter is referred to as “orthodox,” which comes from Greek orthos, meaning “straight” or “right,” and doxa, “opinion.” The modern Spanish word for left, izquierda, comes from the Basque ezkerretara, whose original meaning is “clumsy or crooked hand.” ¹² In a number of different cultures, the right hand is traditionally used to eat, while the left hand is used for… the opposite. Hence expressions like the British and Australian “cack-handed,” which can mean either clumsy or—of course—left-handed.

This litany is far from exhaustive, but you get the idea.

It may be surprising, today, to notice the overwhelming linguistic evidence of implicit bias against the left-handed. In many historical sources, wherever handedness comes up, the bias is more explicit. The Old Testament, for example, refers hundreds of times to right and left hands, and where these are distinguished, the right hand represents honor and strength, the left sin and wickedness. Per Ecclesiastes, “A wise man’s heart is at his right hand; but a fool’s heart at his left.” ¹³ God’s right hand is often described as powerful and “full of righteousness”; “The right hand of the Lord is exalted: the right hand of the Lord doeth valiantly”. ¹⁴

The New Testament is perhaps even starker, per the Gospel of Matthew:

And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the Kingdom […]. ¹⁵

In the Christian tradition, sheep have always been considered saintly, to the point that Jesus himself is referred to as Agnus Dei, the Lamb of God. Naturally, the “goats” exiting to stage left represent the damned. ¹⁶

But this is ancient history, long predating the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and modernity as we know it. How did we get from Iron Age prejudices to institutionalized medical ideas that still held sway within living memory about the left-handed being “aberrant or abnormal”—hence to widespread attempts by 20th century parents, nuns, and school teachers to save the at-risk youth with “handedness conversion therapy”?

Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), physician, anthropologist, criminologist, and arguably the most famous Italian thinker of his era, ¹⁷ played a significant role in this turn—as well as in this book’s larger story of human identity and the “othering” that so often accompanies attempts to distinguish “us” from “them.” Lombroso’s starting point was medical. He sought to bring new rigor to the quantitative study of the human body, both in its healthy or “normal” state and in its “aberrations”—an admirable goal, though a difficult one in an era with few lab tests and little idea of what caused most illness.

Victorian doctors may not have been able to quantify what went on inside the body, but they could at least inspect our outsides. Physical measurements, distances and angles, weights and volumes could be tabulated. Surely such variables correlated with health in some manner? Where previous generations of doctors had relied on lore and intuition, the “modern” doctor now could analyze statistics, and start treating medicine as a science. That was the theory, anyway.

Lombroso worked in prisons and asylums, which prompted him to concentrate on mental disorders, and hence to focus especially on the measurement of the head and facial features. Intuitively, we note that animals with bigger heads relative to their bodies seem to be among the more intelligent; also, certain congenital problems like microcephaly (in which the brain and the head are underdeveloped) usually result in intellectual disability. The head houses the brain, after all. Might the signs of other cognitive impairments—or even gifts, signs of genius—also be detectable through careful physical measurement of the head? What about a predisposition to criminal behavior?

The “logic” proved irresistible. Lombroso came to champion physiognomy, the pseudoscientific belief (to be explored further in Chapter 14) that people’s physical features reveal their essential nature—and their value to society.

I know, I’m making this chain of reasoning sound a bit far fetched. Perhaps it’s best to let Lombroso tell the story in his own words. Luckily, we have a colorful first person account, written shortly before he died, in a 1911 book published by his daughter Gina introducing “scientific criminology” to an eager American audience:

[I]nspiration came to me when […] I applied to the clinical examination of cases of mental alienation the study of the skull, with measurements and weights, by means of the esthesiometer and craniometer. […] I, therefore, began to study criminals in the Italian prisons, and, amongst others, I made the acquaintance of the famous brigand Villella. ¹⁸ This man possessed such extraordinary agility, that he had been known to scale steep mountain heights bearing a sheep on his shoulders. His cynical effrontery was such that he openly boasted of his crimes. On his death one cold grey November morning, I was deputed to make the post-mortem, and on laying open the skull I found on the occipital part, exactly on the spot where a spine is found in the normal skull, a distinct depression which I named median occipital fossa, because of its situation precisely in the middle of the occiput as in inferior animals, especially rodents. This depression, as in the case of animals, was correlated with the hypertrophy of the vermis, known in birds as the middle cerebellum.

This was not merely an idea, but a revelation. At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal—an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals. Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheek-bones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages, and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies, and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood. ¹⁹

It’s hard not to connect this account, with its preternaturally lithe monster scaling steep mountainsides, post-mortem dissections, flaming epiphanies, and anthropophagous horrors, with the Gothic vibe of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). The enduring popularity of Lombroso’s works and those of his followers must have owed something to Romanticism’s lurid flair.

At any rate, Villella’s remains supplied Lombroso with “evidence” confirming his belief that brigantes (brigands) were primitive or “degenerate” types, prone to crime. Hence criminality, Lombroso maintained, is inherited, and carries with it inherited physical characteristics that instruments like calipers and craniographs can measure. Incidentally, this belief conveniently justified his assumption that southern Italians (like the Calabrian Villella) were racially inferior to northern Italians (like himself).

While physiognomy was already an ancient tradition in 1876, when Lombroso first published his ideas in The Criminal Man, ²⁰ he gave it new life by attaching it to the most groundbreaking scientific discovery of the age: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The Criminal Man followed on the heels of The Descent of Man ²¹ (1871), wherein Darwin belatedly acknowledged that evolutionary theory, which he had introduced more than a decade earlier in On the Origin of Species (1859), applied to people too:

[M]an bears in his bodily structure clear traces of his descent from some lower form. ²²

With these words, Darwin didn’t just affirm human evolution, he articulated a grand unifying idea of progress, of life marching ever onward and upward—with humanity representing nature’s most recent (hence most transcendent) crown jewel.

A century later, in 1973, Darwin’s idea inspired mathematician and polymath Jacob Bronowski’s BBC series about the history of everything, cleverly entitled The Ascent of Man. For Darwin and Bronowski both, this ascent had intellectual, artistic, and moral dimensions, blurring the distinction between biological evolution and cultural history. Darwin was, unfortunately for his posterity, explicit in drawing these connections. He went on to write:

[N]or is the difference slight in moral disposition between a barbarian, such as the man described by the old navigator Byron, who dashed his child on the rocks for dropping a basket of sea-urchins, and a Howard or Clarkson; and in intellect, between a savage who does not use any abstract terms, and a Newton or Shakespeare. Differences of this kind between the highest men of the highest races and the lowest savages, are connected by the finest gradations. ²³

As with Lombroso’s racism, this is another illustration of homophily, the pervasive cognitive bias whereby we tend to associate with and favor people similar to ourselves. Darwin’s apex of humanity was thus peopled by the physicist Isaac Newton, the playwright William Shakespeare, the abolitionist Thomas Clarkson, and the philanthropist John Howard. All were English, Christian, white, male, and from the educated classes—that is, much like Darwin himself!

Still, Darwin’s views were in step with those of his peers, and in some ways more liberal; hence his staunch opposition to slavery, evident even here in his inclusion of Clarkson among the great and the good. On the other hand, The Descent of Man lent scientific authority to the idea of a racial hierarchy differentiating humans who are “more human” (more evolved, physically, intellectually and behaviorally) and “less human” (less evolved, physically closer to the other great apes, less intelligent, and less “civilized”).

Thus inspired, it wasn’t such a big step for Lombroso to venture beyond “scientific” racism, and seek out those “clear traces of [man’s] descent from some lower form” specifically in the bodies of the people deemed “lowest” within his own society—beginning with convicts and the mentally ill. For instance: Darwin had pointed out the presence in some people of a “peculiarity in the external ear,” a “little blunt point, projecting from the inwardly folded margin, or helix” which he believed to be the “vestiges of the tips of formerly erect and pointed ears” found in monkeys. Building on this rather flimsy observation, ²⁴ Lombroso claimed that

Twenty-eight percent of criminals have handle-shaped ears standing out from the face as in the chimpanzee: in other cases they are placed at different levels. Frequently too, we find misshapen, flattened ears, devoid of helix, tragus, and anti-tragus, and with a protuberance on the upper part of the posterior margin (Darwin’s tubercle), a relic of the pointed ear characteristic of apes. ²⁵

The next time you look in the mirror, you may want to check whether your ears, too, feature this apish protuberance!

As you might have guessed by now, Lombroso deemed left-handedness a marker of “degeneracy” too:

Compared to normal individuals, criminals show an almost twofold prevalence of left-handedness; in this they resemble children, primitives, and idiots, who are commonly ambidextrous […]. Everyone agrees that left-handedness is a result of the prevalence of the brain’s right hemisphere over the left, as opposed to the normal prevalence of left over right, which results in right-handedness. ²⁶ While the honest person thinks with the left brain, the criminal thinks with the right […]. When people shy away from the left-handed person and refer to him as “sinister,” they simply confirm Italian folk wisdom about left-handed people. Lengthy research will be needed to confirm the popular belief, prevalent especially in Emilia and Lombardy, that swindlers tend to be left-handed. But my own findings provide preliminary proof that left-handedness is more prevalent among swindlers (33 percent) than among other types of criminals. ²⁷

Needless to say, none of this “preliminary proof,” which was based on a very small number of samples and hopelessly biased, stood up to later scrutiny. Nonetheless, the stigma, mired as it was in age-old folk wisdom, stuck—especially once it acquired a scientific veneer.

Given the association of right-handedness with the “normal” dominance of the “good” left brain, and left-handedness with “pathological” dominance of the “bad” right brain, many 19th century thinkers began to similarly associate every other property or character trait that had “good/strong” and “bad/weak” polarities with lateralization, including sex and gender. According to the American phrenologist Orson Squire Fowler (1809–1887), for instance, “seeds from the right testicle [impregnate] only an egg from the right ovary, which produces only boys, while girls are created by the left.” ²⁸

Inevitably, this resulted in sexual orientation also becoming associated with handedness, since here, too, there was a “right” majority and a “wrong” minority. Hence the Australian vernacular for left-handed likely dating to the 1930s, “mollydooker,” from slang for effeminate (“molly”) and fist (“dook” or “duke,” as in “put up your dukes”), or, in US English, the use of the sports term “switch hitter” (meaning an ambidextrous baseball batter) for bisexuality. Austrian physician and psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, one of Sigmund Freud’s earliest and most distinguished followers, wrote in The Language of Dreams (1911),

The right-hand path always signifies the way to righteousness, the left-hand path the path to crime. Thus the left may signify homosexuality, incest, and perversion, while the right signifies marriage […]. ²⁹

Freud’s closest friend for a time, the physician Wilhelm Fliess (1858–1928), took this belief a step further, writing in The Course of Life (1906),

The emphasis on the two halves of the body always changes, so that effeminate men and masculine women are wholly or partially left-handed; and vice versa, left-handed men are invariably more effeminate and left-handed women are more masculine than those who are right-handed. ³⁰

Both Stekel and Fliess, like many other 19th and 20th century thinkers, regarded homosexuality along with any tendency to flout the (highly rigid) gender norms of their day as “perversions” and “aberrations” expressing traits of the “wrong gender.” They also associated these traits with criminality, as will be discussed further in Part II.

Sloppy thinking about handedness and its relationship to gender and sexuality continued throughout the 20th century, and persists even in the 21st, as discussed in detail by Anne Fausto-Sterling in her 2008 book Myths of Gender. Prominent brain lateralization researcher Jerre Levy (1938–), for instance, popularized the notion of the left hemisphere as specializing in “linear reasoning,” while the right hemisphere is more “holistic,” adding that since speech in women is less lateralized than in men (there is some evidence for this), women’s brains must function less efficiently—a claim for which there is no evidence. As Fausto-Sterling points out, Levy’s (unsubstantiated) theory “actually holds that left-handed men resemble women in this regard.” ³¹

In a recurring pattern, that influential 19th and 20th century thinkers lacked the thousands of datapoints required to test their hypotheses didn’t prevent them from making some highly confident claims. With modern surveying and data analysis techniques, it’s now possible to check whether any of those claims hold water. Often, they don’t.