Might be obvious, but just to underscore it - if a conservative ever starts spouting nonsense about how “there wasn’t no transgenders when we was kids” - yes there were, they just didn’t know, and things like this are why
Many early 20th-century British and North American educators and physicians, albeit with a “scientific” rationale, insisted children should be made to write using their right hands. The methods used to obtain this result were often tortuous, including tying a resistant child’s left hand to immobilise it. Typical of the reasoning to justify such practices is a 1924 letter to the British Medical Journal endorsing “retraining” of left-handers to write with their right hands, because otherwise the left-handed child would risk “[old word we don’t use anymore] in mental development; in some cases…actual [old word]”. As late as 1946 the former chief psychiatrist of the New York City Board of Education, Abram Blau, warned that, unless retrained, left-handed children risked severe developmental and learning disabilities and insisted that “children should be encouraged in their early years to adopt dextrality…in order to become better equipped to live in our right-sided world”.
Exactly,
I hate the obvious parallels here.