Persecution

We are truly experiencing a sea change in our understanding of diversity when it comes to gender, sexual identity, and orientation.

For sure, we also need to learn from experts in the field who are investigating the biology behind gender, sexual identity, and orientation, but it’s critical for us to hear from those who have been marginalized by society’s limiting binary view of human sexuality. For too long trans, bi, gay, asexual, and intersex folks have been persecuted and erased from history.

Which leads me to reflect on the way members of my own family are part of a minority that is still hated by 2/3rds of the world.

It is estimated that 10-12% of humanity (regardless of economics, region, race, gender, or biological sex) is part of this minority. Labled “broken”, “sinister”, “untrustworthy”, this segment of the world’s population has been widely punished and subjected to conversion tactics.

Routinely until the early 1970s, schoolchildren in the United States would be shamed and whipped on the hands for having the audacity—To Write With Their Left Hands!!!

Yeah, I’m talking about Leftys. And I will admit that I too live a left handed lifestyle. And it’s a fairly uneventful left handed lifestyle when it comes to overcoming obstacles related getting stuff done with my hands or being ostracized for my innate predilection.

And because of my no-big-deal experience, I have such trouble wrapping my mind around the historical fact that people were condemned as witches for being left handed, and executed. Or that in many parts of the world our left hands are considered filthy and shameful.

There is no clear scientific explanation for the imbalanced percentages of lefties and righties. And although hand preference has long been studied, there is no consensus on the precise mechanism that determines handedness. Genetics, epigenetics, environment, evolution, and neurology all seem to play some part.

But we don’t actually need scientists to tell us that lefthanders exist! And while the experts go about their work, we don’t need scientists to tell us that trans, bi, gay, asexual, and intersex people also exist.

Nature thrives on diversity, and society does too.