The text in the picture reads: "Being gay is like being left handed. Some people are, most people aren't and nobody really knows why. It's not right or wrong, it's just the way things are!" Author unknown.
Not so long ago people would have been trying to train left handedness out of me as I grew up and would have claimed it was for my own good. Even when I began school in the 1970s there was a reception teacher who would try to force right handedness, just like King George VI was forced to write with his right hand.
I had it easy though: In Italy and Spain right handedness was compulsory by law. In Communist Albania, you could be prosecuted for using your left hand to write which is very different to the way people in the USA were sometimes accused of being Communists if they were left handed.
Ten years before I began school, children were being beaten in some religious schools in Britain if they displayed any sign of left handedness because it was not of God. Some religious leaders used Bible references to justify their treatment of and stigma against left handedness.
Twenty years before my thankfully short-lived experiences of that teacher, in the 1950s corporal punishment for using your left hand was common and children would have their left hands tied to their chairs to force them to use the right. All of that can lead to learning difficulties, dyslexia, speech problems.
In some countries this forcing still happens and two thirds of the world's population live in societies where there is stigma against left handed people.
In past centuries if I stayed left handed I could have been condemned by laity and clergy alike, even accused of witchcraft, and suffered all kinds of fates.
There was stigma too against the left handed in Newcastle Upon Tyne, where I live. I learned while writing this post that in Geordie dialect I am a "cuddy wifter," a term that probably came into use in the 1920s and was added to the OED a couple of years ago. "Cuddy" comes from a Scots word meaning a donkey or a stupid person. "Wifter" comes from a local dialect verb "wift" meaning to go astray. So as a left handed person I am known as a "stupid person who has gone astray." Can we reclaim this double insult term and use it with pride?
Until not so long ago left handedness was considered a sign of savagery and criminality. Everyone reading this will agree that's total nonsense but had we lived in the late 1800s we'd have believed it and we'd have shot down anyone questioning the "truth" we believed. In the mid-20th century a prominent psychoanalyst was teaching that left handedness arose from perversity, an idea stretching back at least as far as Plato and Socrates. Plato said left handedness arose from bad parenting whereas Aristotle believed that if you were left handed it meant you were born evil.
The word sinister derives from left handed. My dad used to call me cack handed when I was growing up, a term for clumsiness that originally meant left handed. "Left" itself derives from a word meaning weak. There is a similar etymology in many languages. And whatever you do, don't make the sign of the cross in a Catholic church with your left hand - you're liable to get told off by a nun! The right hand is for blessing, the left for cursing.
That prejudice is gone, at least here in the UK. Mostly. It's still strong in many places but here it's one of the regrettable parts of our history.
All we're left with now are the adaptations left handed people have to make to things designed for right handed people. There are cash machines that are tough to use left handed. The keyboard I'm using now has the number pad convenient for the right hand and I've never been able to master it even though I achieved a first class pass in my advanced typewriting exams. Scissors are such a challenge that I forced myself to learn to cut right handed. You tap in on the Tyne and Wear Metro on the right and the similar machine on some buses is almost inaccessible left handed. There are lots more little things that make the life of a left handed person just that little bit harder. Things that don't arise from stigma but from common use and which are unlikely to change to something more symmetrical.
We look back at the history of how left handed people were treated and we're shocked. We might perhaps wonder how we could all have been so stupid to behave so badly and almost disbelieve how we could have lived with such a delusion.
Being gay or being transgender is much like being left handed.
It just is. Or it just isn't.
It's just a thing. Nothing to worry about. Nothing to condemn for. There's just as little reason objectively to try to force someone to become not gay or to act not gay as there is to try to make someone right handed.
Many people still think there are reasons but they believe and behave much as my teacher at school did in the 1970s. And future generations will look back on them with as much shock, horror, and perhaps even shame as we look back on the treatment of left handed people in our country.
I look for the day when prejudice about these things are gone too.
I look for the day when being gay or straight, transgender or cisgender, is a non-issue. I believe that day will come.
And just as I hope that worldwide stigma against left handed people will be replaced by acceptance that it's just a normal variation of humanity, I hope the same for the way LGBT+ people are thought of and treated across the globe.
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