For every family of a left-handed person, a moment arrives when it becomes clear that the way of the right-handed masses is just not going to cut it.

The moment of reckoning for my unsuspecting parents arrived on my first birthday, when they repeatedly attempted to shove a tiny fork into my right hand in order to eat a baby-sized ceremonial birthday cake. After throwing it on the ground repeatedly in frustration, instant-replay style, I grabbed a hunk of cake with my left hand and squeezed it through my fingers like a tiny Hulk, mauling it around in my gummy mouth. VHS tape evidence shows a kitchen full of relatives gaping in horror. That day, it became official: I was an ornery lefty.

In both longstanding myth and modern urban lore, there are quite a few adages and assumptions about what it means to be a left-handed person. Over the course of my life — like most lefties — it seems as if I’ve heard them all. (Spoiler alert: they’re almost all negative.) The root of the word “sinister” derives from sinistra, the Latin term for “left.” In the Bible, those who displease God are sent to his left side, while those who he holds in high esteem are sorted to the right. Australians often refer to left-handed people as “cacky-handed” — which also indicates a degree of clumsiness. The cross-cultural connection between left handedness and varying degrees of assumed evil and idiocy is strong.

A 2013 New Yorker article even pointed to early 20th-century research by Cesare Lombroso (the grandfather of modern criminology) that indicated lefties as a group might be more prone criminal behavior. “I do not dream at all of saying that all left-handed people are wicked, but that left-handedness, united to many other traits, may contribute to form one of the worst characters among the human species,” Lombroso wrote in 1903.

For a dedicated group, these sociocultural stereotypes have served as a call to action. The people behind the Bloomington, Indiana-based Handedness Research Institute are so concerned about the centuries-old bias against “alternative handedness” that they founded an entire non-profit research organization to “advance the scientific understanding of handedness…and help alleviate the social and educational discrimination of left-handers worldwide.”