Lefties, Righties and Ambidextrous

[Heather Shay]

I recently took a poll asking if you were right handed, left handed or ambidextrous and not looking at the national polls for MTF

 

OUR results were 

 

Left - 5

Right - 6

Both - 8

 

Interesting....

[Jackie C.]

Huh. That's a lot of ambidextrous people for such a small group.

 

Hugs! 

[Heather Shay]

who'd a thought.....

[SaraAW]

Too bad we didn't get more respondents, difficult to really draw any conclusions from the sample size, the fact it was sourced from here only and self-reported. Still, definitely interesting. Does not reflect the larger populations distribution of handedness by a very large margin. There is still so much we don't know in regards to the origins of handedness. it would be interesting if a larger study were conducted and if it would provide any additional insight to how / why handedness develops. There are a couple of studies showing exposure in utero to a particular synthetic estrogen used in the 50's to early 70's increased prevalence of left-handedness. There are studies also showing that exposure to androgens in utero may have a small impact to gender. To me, there is something to explore here to see if there is any correlation between being trans and handedness.

[Heather Shay]

I come from an Industrial Engineering, statistics, 6 sigma, Green Belt background... sounds like you have a similar statistics and data background or interest. Certainly need larger samples and I'm sure the confidence level on our study is not very good. It was just interesting and I have heard about the studies you refer to. 

 

What I would really find interesting (and there probably is one) - a study of transpeople and handedness compared to handedness of the major binary genders and maybe handedness of intersex and all the other gender categories.

[SaraAW]

Yep, similar.  Green belt and am currently a fraud and security analyst as part of my job. I am constantly buried in data and I love it.

Found one study, behind a paywall ; however, the abstract makes mention of: Numerous studies demonstrate that male-to-female (MTF) transgender people have higher rates of left-handedness, but the theoretical basis for this difference is not well described. 

[Heather Shay]

aha... I was also the person who wrote procedures for ISO and gage calibration traceable to NIST....

 

I definitely can believe it - I would suspect comparing general population and trans that the trans have a higher density of left handedness than the general population. I guess that's why a lot of us come from a creative background. That to would be an interesting study comparing trans creative backgrounds (music, art, theatre, quilting, knitting sewing, crafts, etc.) to the general population. I would guess the percentage would also be higher for trans.