<p>By the way, jym626, speaking of pre-natal influences on handedness (the use of the word “pathological” sounds strange to me, even though I realize that in this context it doesn’t have the same negative connotations as it does in common use), I know there are some studies showing a higher than usual rate of left handedness in sons of mothers who took DES during preganancy. Along with higher rates of things like autoimmune disorders, cryptorchidism at birth, and being transsexual/transgender. It could just be a coincidence that all of those happen to have been true in my case, but I do wonder sometimes, even though I’m not particularly enamored of the idea that I was “defective” at birth in all those ways. And not that the “why” of any of it really matters.</p>
<p>Hmmm. My mother took DES when pregnant with me. If that is the case wouldn’t there have been an increased incidence of lefthandedness and Transgenders, Transexuals born in the 60’s? Maybe there were. Interesting.</p>
<p>I’m not sure that the percentage of women who took DES was ever large enough to materially affect the incidence of things like that in the overall population. And even in the population of people whose mothers took DES, the increased percentage of, say, lefthandedness may be statistically significant, but still isn’t huge (maybe 15% as opposed to 10%; something like that) But nobody knows for sure what effects various kinds of exogenous hormones have. Whether something like DES, or stuff that’s in the environment in general, like the phthalates that one reads about these days. It’s just that in my particular case, I seem to have been blessed with just about every single one of the possible effects one reads about. I’ve always been lucky with things like that! (Not that I think it’s “bad” to be lefthanded or trans or to have an autoimmune disease or to be born with cryptorchidism that wasn’t fixed until I was 11, who knows why [in light of later events, they shouldn’t have bothered!], but they do all make life more difficult in their own ways, and to varying degrees.)</p>
<p>Write with my left, everything else is essentially my right hand.</p>
<p>So annoying when people see me use scissors with my right hand and call me a liar. Then I write with my left and my right hand to show them the difference, and they think I wrote poorly with my right on purpose. UGH! =.=</p>
<p>In some cultures, the right and left hands are assigned specific “jobs” related to body functions and this leads a right-handedness in areas such as writing, and I knew very few overt southpaws when I was growing up. Looking at the Latin terms for left and right (or at least based on my perception on how positive/negative the two words are), I suspect the West had a bias towards the righties at one time too, but looking at recent presidents, southpaws are highly ORM. Curious if there are any studies on other organs that possess this sort of polarity.</p>
<p>I am extremely left-handed. If I have 12 plastic grocery bags to carry, I will carry 11 with my left hand, and 1 with my right. I can only talk with the phone to my left ear (and can only propr it against my left shoulder, which is probably causing my neck to be permanently crooked). This over-dominance gave me serious trouble when my first child was born. I could only carry him in my left arm since the right arm was too weak and awkward to be practical for rmore than a minute or two. However, that meant I had to do everything with my right hand, which I had never practiced doing. It was a tough first year, but thankfully now I am more adept using my right hand.</p>
<p>Do I think I am different from righties? Not sure, but I think I am more extreme in my skill set: very good at some things, terrible at others, and not much in the middle. My righty family members seem more balanced.</p>
<p>I am old enough to testify that I have witnessed teachers in the early years of elementary school try to force lefty’s to write with their right hand. Never worked, and we righty’s all felt sorry for those kids.</p>
<p>How about cutting bread? My husband and I are both lefties, but I cut bread from the right end of the loaf and then he comes along and turns the bread around and cuts it from the left end of the loaf. </p>
<p>Both kids are righties, so the kids sit on one side of the table and we sit on the other.</p>
<p>I am primarily right handed and in my family of 3, I am the minority H and D are both lefties. Other than writing, right handed, many tasks I do left handed. I cut with my left using regular scissors much easier than cutting with my right and I iron more comfortably using my left hand. H who is primarily a lefty, cuts with his right and is a right handed golfer. D does almost everything primarily with her left hand.</p>
<p>I write lefty, but do many things with either, preferring the left. I was one of those the teachers tried to force to be righty. Also, in my sophomore year of hs, the Spainsh teacher requested that all the lefties raise their (right) hand. She wrote our names then promptly told us she would never send us to the board to write because she thought lefties looked strange writing.</p>
<p>The main thing w/me about lefty v righty is that when I throw underhand, it must be righty, and overhand, lefty.</p>
<p>Oh, and I have been a lefty Spainsh hs teacher for over 30 years. She did not deter me.</p>
<p>I may a unique perspective on handedness because I was born lefty and had to switch because of an accident. I still use my left hand for many things. </p>
<p>The difference to me is that the brain really does work differently on each side. If I want to experience a project or a problem differently, I switch the pen to my left hand and my thought processes change in substantial ways that reflect the different hemisphere connection. So my feeling, which is based solely on me, is that left and right handers are a little like British and American speakers; both speak English but the brains behind the words are different.</p>
<p>I have four kids - two oldest right handed like me and their dad. Two youngest - left handed. D3 - “very” left handed and I knew it by age 2. actually probably 1-1/2. Her Ped put a note in her medical record and politely informed me I could not be sure until age 3. I knew. It was like her right hand didn’t exist. She had trouble turning a door knob for years.
She (now 21 yrs) was home for the weekend and I took her to get new running shoes. Her left foot is larger than her right foot - I never knew that. No idea if her right thumb is smaller. I will check on that.
If it’s pathological it must be subtle - perhaps the lay in the womb?</p>