When all this was ramping up, I tried to do a lot of research into what tools I would need to navigate the world with my left hand, and there were two things flooding my search results: things for parents to buy for their left-handed kindergarteners, and mensa nerds looking to minmax their IQ by becoming ambidextrous.
So, life seems, at least from dipping my toe in it, to be a liiitttle bit condescending to left-handed people still.
My parents’ generation were kids back when teachers would smack you if you tried to write with your left hand, and it does seem significantly good that we don’t do THAT anymore, but, goddamn. There are a LOT of apparently right-hand-specialized tools that don’t SEEM specialized at first glance.
Left-handed scissors were by FAR the best thing I purchased: without relearning how to use scissors, using right-handed scissors in my left hand is deeply annoying. Left handed scissors work instantly with no learning curve. They contain no software, they are available most places I see any scissors (tho, def not all), and they weren’t marked up hugely over the right-handed scissors I saw in the same stores.
Left-hand dominant folks I know can all use left or right-handed scissors; left-handed ones just change how they see what they’re cutting, and how ergonomic the pressure required to cut is. They make my day to day slightly easier and I appreciate them immensely.
Left-handed mice are a lot harder to find; while I don’t think hand dominance and mouse hand choice is usually connected for most folks, having no ability to extend (lift) my fingers on my right hand meant mousing with it was out of the question. Being able to mouse with both hands really helped me back in my carpal tunnel days and I was determined to find a gaming mouse for my left hand for this recovery period. In the end I found an ambidextrous Logitech – the Pro 2 Lightspeed: you can change which side has the extra buttons, which is a really great feature, and when I am mousing more with both hands I might enable the buttons on both sides and duplicate their function.
In the specialized realm of music and sports there are left-handed alternatives for string instruments, for golf clubs, baseball gloves, etc. That was no surprise.
As I dug into it, though, it seemed to spiral. Did you know kitchen knives are sharpened with right-handed use in mind? Can openers absolutely are designed for right-hand dominance. Corkscrews and screwdrivers and so forth are designed expecting the strongest force on them to be compatible with the strongest force capable in a right hand. None of this PREVENTS left-handed use! It just means that left-handed use is slightly (or significantly sometimes) less ergonomic.
Slightly less ergonomic might not be a big deal when you’re able bodied, and when you’ve spent your life learning to accomodate that slight hurdle. And, as my uncles tell me, it’s a lot better nowadays than when they’d come home with welts on the back of their left hands for writing with the wrong one in class. (They rarely use left-hand specific tools as there was no chance of those being available when they were learning things as kids.) But it DOES add a layer when you’re NOT ablebodied, or have anything else adding exhaustion to your day.
Anyways, left-handed-ness. The world seems more annoying for left-hand dominance than I had realized. Sorry for my prior ignorance!
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