Dextronormative oppression

Ed note: A sinister plot??

By Steve Clifford – thanks to Ed M.

Serving on non-profits boards, I was obliged to attend DEI training sessions. Among other things, I learned that assimilation was cultural genocide. I then cursed my immigrant grandparents. Seduced by assimilation, they deprived me of my Irish heritage– a diet of boiled potatoes and a sixth-grade education.

However, after finishing DEI training, I realized how transformative these sessions were. I now advocate DEI training to embrace the maligned minority group to which I belong, the Left Handers.

Here is what studies have shown about a marginalized minority group that:

• During the Middle Ages were thought to be possessed by the Devil.
• According to Joshua Goodman, a Harvard economist, left-handers scored 10 to 12 percent below average on measures of cognitive skill, even after controlling for health and family background and have “more emotional and behavioral problems.” 
• Other academic studies found left-handers had shorter life spans, anger-control issues and insomnia, experienced high levels of prenatal hormones, allergies, birth trauma, and immune disorders.
• Academic researchers often blamed this group’s problems on genetic brain differences.

Professors would be fired for suggesting an ethnic or religious group was genetically inferior. Where are Harvard, MIT, and Penn when left-handers need them?

Left-handers, 12% of the population, are the only minority group that is routinely subject to hate speech, handist slurs such as gauche, sinister, adroit, awkward, and dexterous. Perversely, the over-educated believe that use of such words marks them as articulate rather than narrow-minded bigots. 

In Seattle uttering the phrase “a Jewish compliment” or “an Asian compliment” would be punished by Impalement or the Breaking Wheel, while “a left-handed compliment” prompts a knowing smile. 

The language police demand substitution of “unhoused” for homeless and Latinx for Latino. Immigrants challenged by the English language are “Emergent Bilinguals.” Lefties get no anodyne euphemisms such as “the equally handed.” We are simply clumsy.

All right-handed people should attend DEI sessions on Handism to learn what life is like for the equally-handed. They will sit at left-handed desks and smear ink on their hands as they write from right to left. At the dinner they will suffer the microaggressions of constant elbowing, and table manners that demand oafish, uncouth and graceless actions.

For a week they must use left-handed tools and utensils: peelers, doors, handrails, measuring cups, tape measures, cameras, zippers, trowels, rotary cutters, ice cream scoops, paint rollers, handguns, rifles, box cutters, utility knives, garden pruners, wire cutters, strippers, wrenches, pliers, Swiss Army knives, tweezers, pie cutter/server, corkscrews, breadknives, chainsaws, circular saws, weed whackers, grinders, sanders, other power tools, and spiral notebooks. 

DEI trainers need no tests to reveal unconscious bias. In every language, the bias is explicit: The English word left comes from Old English lyft, meaning idle, weak, or useless. Other languages suggest right means correct and left means wrong, clumsy, or bad.

I conclude that dextronormative oppression is world-wide pandemic.