Cartoon: Left Handitude Is On The Rise!

The guest artist for this strip is Naomi Rubin! Naomi is a longtime friend of mine and a wonderful cartoonist. Her work is much more influenced by Japanese comics than mine or Becky’s, which provides a neat visual change of pace.

This graph from The Washington Post (which I swiped for the newspaper in panel 2) shows the story of the explosion in left handedness:

Julia Serano, whose writing is essential, commented:

During the twentieth century, in many Western countries, there was a precipitous rise in left-handedness. For instance, in Australia, the prevalence of left-handed people increased from 2.0 percent to a whopping 13.2 percent! Apparently, a social contagion swept through these nations, and children suddenly began feeling peer pressure to experiment with handedness and to adopt left-handed identities. Then, the left-handed deviants began pushing their “left-hander agenda” in order to recruit . . . oh, wait, sorry, that’s not what happened at all.

In actuality, left-handedness (like being transgender) is a part of human variation — both are pan-cultural trans-historical phenomena. In the case of left-handedness, roughly 10 to 12 percent of children inexplicably express this tendency from as early as infancy. In the beginning of the twentieth century, there was intense stigma targeting left-handedness, which led parents and schools to force all children to be right-handed, often against their intrinsic preferences (this still happens in many places). But eventually, there was a realization that this stigma was unnecessary and unfair, and people started letting children decide for themselves which hands to use. In other words, there wasn’t really a rise in left-handedness so much as there was a rise in left-handed acceptance.

The increasing numbers of people identifying as trans is, to a great extent, a result growing acceptance of trans identities. (Although that’s probably not the entire story). The moral panic we’re seeing over this is just as foolish as panicking over the existence of lefties would be.

TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON

This cartoon has four panels. All the panels show a 1950s or 1960s married couple at breakfast at their kitchen table; the husband is reading a newspaper.

PANEL 1

A big caption at the top says “1955.”

HUSBAND: Oh no!

WIFE: What’s wrong?

HUSBAND: Left Handitude is on the rise!

PANEL 2

The husband holds up the newspaper, which has a graph showing rapidly increasing left-handedness.

HUSBAND: Look at this! When I was a kid in the twenties, you hardly ever met a left hander! Now five times as many self-identify as (choke! gasp!) leftwardsly!

PANEL 3

A close-up of the husband, looking disturbed and suspicous.

HUSBAND: What could be causing this unnatural increase? It must be a social contagion! Or sinistrous adults grooming naive youth with their sick southpaw ideology!

PANEL 4

The wife has a hand on her chin, looking thoughtful; the husband makes a dismissive gesture.

WIFE: Maybe it’s because we stopped whipping kids who write with their left hand?

HUSBAND: Don’t be ridiculous.

CHICKEN FAT WATCH

PANEL 1 – The character Link from Legend of Zelda is sitting on a shelf. Link is known to be left-handed.

There’s a phrenology head sculpture on a lower shelf.

The back of the newspaper says “IKE IN LEFTY SCANDAL!”

PANEL 2 – The newspaper is called “Right-Washed Tribune,” with the tag line “Right News Writing For Rightly Right-Thinking Righties.” The main story is “Leftism Epidemic! President Calls for Widespread Panic.” Another story is “Has Leftism Gone Too Far? Six Normal-Handed Writers Opine.” Another story: “Study: Left Handed Scissors More Stabby.” And finally, in the smallest print: “Cartoonist blames text too tiny to read on left handed typesetters.”

PANEL 3 – There’s a pattern of left hands holding pencils in the background.

PANEL 4 – A Scottish Fold (which Naomi informs me is a breed of cat) is lying on the table, reading a copy of “Cat Fancy,” with the story “My human was a left hander! Fuzzle Winkles explains her secret pain.”

A picture on the wall is the “Flamel” symbol from Full Metal Alchemist.

Another picture is Ned Flanders from The Simpsons (famously left handed). His left hand is mysteriously moving in front of the picture frame.

A self-portrait of Naomi as a jack ‘o lantern is peering in the window.

The newspaper the husband is reading now says “Readers go blind straining to read tiny upside down text. Might it be a lefty plot?”