But it's a false test simply to swap the gender of a MC or antagonist in many books.
There is a huge overlap of physical characteristics, empathy, skills, emotion.
Some characters may be written more averagely. Some men characters might be under 5' 6", have small feet and hands and rounded soft faces. Some females might be big women.
Some men might be caring and empathic.
Some women might be aggressive, macho and egotistic.
Writing partly relies on stereotypes. But also writers invent quirky characters and in some cases deliberately mislead.
Some books the women & men might be mostly interchangeable, others not.
So IMO the "swap gender of a character in a book" idea is nonsense unless the author is doing it for some reason during the writing/editing.
Quote:
|
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.
|
Maybe sometimes. But IMO it needs an entire re-write. Depends on the book.
I've just finished reading five of W.E. Johns "Worrels" books. Many of the Biggles books have no women at all. Yet it's not Biggles and Ginger (or Bertie or Algy) in skirts. The female character and her sidekick are in the WAAF in WWII. Surprisingly good adventures and maybe better than many Biggles books. Interestingly Johns makes use of supposed stereotypes about girls and women and attacks them. Or in one case a leader is described as "Victorian". Of course there were really women spies and Nazis did shoot them, but Johns surely can't have known that at least when writing the 1st book. The books all written during WWII. So possibly the lack of women in the earlier Biggles books (or later ones) was deliberate because "books for boys" and not any blindness on Johns part. The Worrels books were of course marketed to girls.
See also Roy Snell series of adventure books with either women or men as MC (most of the characters described as Kids would be regarded as adults today).
But there are other books were the gender could be swapped and it would make no difference. Part is our societal/cultural expectations and the culture we live in. So there are SF & F where the characters could be swapped with re-writing. There are others with Aliens were it would be a major rewrite because the female has a chest pouch for the tiny baby, a bit like our marsupials.
So in short, it's pointless experimenting with swapping gender of a character unless you are the author and experimenting. It doesn't actually prove anything, except writing a novel isn't simple.
Even changing from 1st person to 3rd or vice versa is a lot more than a simple edit. Entire chapters have to be completely re-written.