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This is only tangentially related to this topic.

A week or so before I had heard about this Galbrush paradox I'd read an article in a blog. The author didn't say anything about the Galbrush paradox and I don't know if he knew about it but as I remember he was saying more or less the same thing about women characters, that our expectations are that they should be more than mere empty headed wives and secretaries. And he said that as a result women characters are typically androgynous and that writers should give them some acceptable female characteristic, for example, how Ripley cared for the little girl in Aliens. (While Pvt. Vasquez busy being a badass and showing off her muscles.)

It got me thinking, what would happen if you took a book and changed a female character to a male character? Change all of the female pronouns to male pronouns and fix any other gender specific stuff. As a bonus, if there was romance then it would become a gay romance. I tried this with the book Mystery Ranch by Arthur Chapman, downloaded from Project Gutenberg. It looked like there was only one female character so it should be easy. A couple of regular expression replacements and I was nearly done.

But I discovered a quirk in the English language that I'd never noticed before. With the male pronouns we have he, him, and his, with his being possessive. With the female pronouns we have she and her (and hers). Her can be both possessive and not; "I saw her standing there." or "She put on her hat."

(And don't talk to me about trying the pronouns that the non-binary folks use; they, them, their, etc. I've been reading a series that has a non-binary character and those are definitely confusing. I start thinking that the author is talking about some group of people only to subsequently realize he's talking about the non-binary person.)