Learning to Drive on the Other Side of the Road

When making sweeping changes, be forgiving of the learning curve

I had never driven on the left side of the road before our trip to Scotland.

While there was no reason to rent a car and drive around as Edinburgh was a pretty walkable city, my first ex-wife and I decided to take a day trip to Glasgow and the surrounding area. I decided a car would be fun. I was wrong.

It didn't help that I couldn't understand a single word coming out of the Scot renting me the vehicle. Yes, the Scots speak English but the accent on some is so thick they might as well be speaking gibberish to my ear. What I got from him was a bit of rules for the road, a semblance of directions, and an answer to why they drove on the wrong side of the road in the first place. It had something to do with ancient swordsmen who wore there swords on the left and needed to meet opponents wielding it with their right.

We paid our fee, signed our forms, and took the keys to a parked black Peugeot 205. I got in the driver's side only to realize instantly that the steering wheel was not in front of me. We switched. The experience was kind of surreal. Nothing felt normal. As we drove, it took all of my focus not to actually drive but to constantly remind myself to stay to the left.

"Honey! Look over there! It's beautiful."

"Wow. Even with the mist, the place looks —"

"Left. Left! LEFT!!"

"Jesus Christ! This is fucking retarded!"

"Don't say that."

"Jesus Christ?"

"Retarded."

"Well, fuck. Then these roads and this right side steering wheel and left side roadway is ...stupid."

"You can't equate retarded with stupid. That's just uncool."

"According to whom?"

"Retards, of course."

Calm down. It was the mid-nineties and no mentally challenged Scots were in the car...

Driving on the left wasn't difficult necessarily. It was weird. It was not the habit that had formed since learning drive at age fourteen. It wasn't wrong but it felt off like eating soup with a fork or wearing your pants backwards like Kris Kross in the nineties. It made me unreasonably angry at the Scottish.

The whole pronoun/non-binary/gender identification feels eerily similar.

I understand why someone with diagnosable gender dysphoria would need to be validated, would require some societal changes to make living amongst the rest of us who are used to driving on the right side of the road (not to be confused with the correct side but the literal right hand side) less arduous. I had a student (middle school) who grew up and did the entire transgender transformation, changed pronouns from her to him, changed his name, surgically modified his body. When he caught up with me, I was a bit caught off guard but I respected his new identity.

I also understand the nonsense of the non-binary label. It means nothing to claim you are non-binary. It's like claiming you have no ethnicity or aren't human. It's silly. If you have genitals of either sex, you're binary. If you want to pretend that you're different or special, bonus and if you let me know what you prefer to be referred to as, I'll go along because while I'm an asshole, I'm not an overtly and unnecessarily rude one. On the other hand, if I veer onto the right hand side of the road out of habit, a gentle reminder is better than a self righteous offense. The more you bark, the less I'll play along.

Here's a tip. I'm polite and respectful to people I know or meet. Most people are. Sort of an unwritten contract that dictates I treat people in person as well as I can unless they're behaving like a little dick. If you are thrown into anguish and agony if someone misgenders you, get offline. You don't know those faceless names and they don't know you. They have no reason to respect your self-involved boundaries and no matter how hard you try to cancel them, you won't A) change their minds or B) get rid of all of them. Your issue is not with your pronouns—it's with the millions of people online who couldn't give two shits for a dollar about you, let alone your self identifying silliness. Wading in for hours a day inviting these angry, judgmental boobs into your mindspace is self destructive.

If you're legitimately transgender, you already know this for the same reason I know to avoid a lesbian bar cuz they'll kick my ass. I also know to stay away from homeless camps in a jacket made of meth and strictly shun the backstage of a Broadway musical.

We're all doing the best that we can to drive on the side of the road that is considered the new normal but it's gonna take some of us a bit more practice. Truth is most people are less bothered by it than you'd think with the exception of kids getting to decide for themselves a major life change before they're legally able to smoke or get a job. Most people who don't quite get it aren't bad people—they're just frustrated that they now need to drive on the left side of the road. If the Scottish told me I was a bad person for accidentally going over the line while driving on their roads, I'd likely say fuck them because I was already kind of pissed (unreasonably so, but still pissed) that it wasn't what I was accustomed to having spent my formative years learning a different way.

Here's another tip. You decided the rules needed changing so the change is on you to execute. If your desire to have your non-binary identity respected and accepted, you won't act like such a little dick about it.