The Left Hand of Daftness
Terrible comparisons between the rise in lefthandedness and trans youth echo climate change denial.
David Hewitt – Void If Removed
Anyone with any experience trying to engage with misinformation and disinformation will know: bad arguments never die. No matter how blatantly and obviously wrong they are, they will simply keep reappearing, spouted with supreme confidence over and over, wasting time, and poisoning the information space. It is a frustrating and thankless endeavour trying to explain at length why a neat soundbite is actually completely misleading nonsense. So it is deeply disappointing that those who thought themselves skeptics or voices of reason in a battle against “right-wing misinformation” on subjects like climate change have fallen so far down the rabbithole of employing the exact same tactics when it comes to sex and gender.
A particularly egregious example is dismissing the dramatic recent rise in young children being referred to gender clinics or claiming a trans identity as no more than people expressing their true selves, analogous to the rise in left-handedness over the last century. For example, this canard was employed by John Oliver in a recent segment of Last Week Tonight:
As for the rapid rise in kids identifying as trans, as the writer Julia Serrano has pointed out when you look at a chart of left-handedness among Americans over the 20th century you see a massive Spike when we stopped forcing kids to write with their right hand and then a plateau. That doesn’t mean everyone became left-handed as though there was a rapid onset southpaw dysphoria, it means people were free to be who they were and to the extent that some young people are just exploring their gender identity how exactly is that a bad thing?
This is all quite deceptively simple, and for those of us who have in the past railed against intolerance it is quite an attractive argument. Sure, live and let live, embrace gender fluidity, let kids be kids. But we aren’t talking about “exploring their gender identity”, or simple gender nonconformity – we’re talking about affirming and medicalising cross-sex identification in children. There is a vast difference between simply not beating a left-handed child for being “sinister”, and celebrating placing a likely gay child on a medical pathway that leads to infertility and lifelong inability to orgasm.
John Oliver is not a random idiot. He is a well-paid and highly visible celebrity, with a team of writers and researchers backing him up, and a responsibility to not misinform viewers, yet here he is repeating one of the most obviously flawed arguments around. This is then, inevitably, picked up and recirculated on social media, retweeted by thousands upon thousands, seen by millions.
If you scratch the surface, you see that this whole analogy is deeply flawed. There are differences in the numbers at stake, the rate of change and time period, the social and historical context, the potential effects on the individual, the requirements placed on society, the differential spread between the sexes, and so on. There is not enough similarity between the facts of the change to claim that the reasons for the change are the same. The whole argument rests on ignoring absolutely everything at issue, and focus only on that simple-sounding plea to let people be who they are.
For starters, here is the endlessly circulated graph of the rise in left-handedness over the 20th century:
John and his team straightforwardly attribute this to left-handers not being tolerated by society, and put the rise over the last century to simply letting people be free to be who they are.
Going back to the actual source of the graph – The History and Geography of Human Handedness – you can see that the truncated graphic shows only part of the story, and over a longer timescale a different picture emerges:
What we see is a gradual suppression of left-handedness over the course of two-and-a half centuries spanning the industrial revolution, where machinery was inevitably designed to be used by the majority (ie right-handers). While one factor certainly is that during the rise of universal schooling religious views about left-handedness being “sinister” resulted in schoolchildren facing regular beatings for writing with the “wrong” hand, this was far from the only cause…