What if the Doctor decided what hand you write with? “You look like a leftie, so I say you're a leftie and that's the way it's going to be for the rest of your life. Congratulations mom, you had a leftie.”
Lefties and Righties look physically different. They play different social roles, wear different clothes and associate with their peers differently than with their “opposites”. Some people say that whether you're a Leftie or a Rightie is proclaimed by god. Others say that it's genetic. Some claim that handedness is completely socially constructed and neither Lefties nor Righties are superior to the other. BUT (and this is huge) no self-respecting Leftie would ever want to be a Rightie. Only Perverts would do that. Anyone who would want to be what they're not is sick in the head, and probably a deviant on top of that. So what do you do if in spite of all that you know you're really a Rightie?
You look like a Leftie, but still, all your life you've known that you're really a Rightie. It only makes sense to you; it's the way you've always felt. So you want to do the things that Righties do, wear what Righties wear and look like a Rightie. Everyone you tell this to looks at you like you're insane because they see a Leftie. They call you a pervert, send you to mental hospitals, say you're sick, evil, going against the word of god, going to go to hell. Nobody takes you seriously, nobody watches you use your right hand because that's deviant behaviour. It's even listed in the DSM: “Handed Identity Disorder” and they're trying their damndest to get it listed as a paraphilia because it fits their biased notions and they know better because they're the experts after all.
When you're a child, you learn that even talking about cross-handed behaviour is Wrong. You get teased in school, and even bullied. You get punished at home, called a sinner in church, sent to the Office in school which leads to still more punishment at home. So you learn to hide your feelings. You learn to act like all the other Lefties act, often overcompensating to make up for your uncertainties. Sometimes this is enough. You can fake your way through life. Lots of people do. Being miserable isn't that difficult a life, is it? But sooner or later you hit the wall. You can't take it any more. The pain of being wrong is just too much.
So what do you do? Sneaking out and crossdressing as a Rightie helps, sometimes. You have to go where nobody knows you and even then it's risky, because dressing as a Rightie threatens the Lefthood of all the other Lefties and they may beat the hell out of you for daring to insult their Leftliness. They may even kill you, and justify it by telling themselves that you deserved to die because you deceived them and made them homodextrous.
Supposing that you don't get attacked, you still may get sneered at for being a deviant, have your identity decided for you by people who know what you “really” are and oh, so smugly inform you that you didn't fool them. Even after all that, it's still easier than trying to pretend that you're a Leftie.
So you try and change things. You go to a Therapist who specialises in treating Handed Identity Disorder. You talk for months about how you've always known, never daring to stray away from the established narrative because other transhanduals have told you horror stories about how you can be refused treatment if you don't pander to the prejudices of the doctors and you'll be stuck living in misery for the rest of your life, if you don't kill yourself out of despair first.
Finally you get permission to live the way you've always known you need to. You take Rightie hormones that slowly begin to alter your body to look like a Rightie. You change your name, and start living full time in your chosen handed role. You throw out your whole wardrobe and buy a new one, piece by piece. You may lose your family, your friends, your job, but that's a small price to pay now that you can finally pick up a pen and write naturally for the first time in your life.
Xposted in my journal.
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contemplative
silly
curious