Could you swap your characters' gender at will? And one other thing. (old thread)

There was a time I (female) wrote mostly male characters. In a short story I edited for submission in October, I gender swapped one of my mains from male to female and feel like it really improved the story.

It is interesting to think about, and especially if I'm using Shakespeare or a fairy tale or something for my prime inspiration, I sometimes am swapping gender anyway. I pick my main characters sex/gender for a specific reason, and in some cases, swapping would totally make no sense.

1. With most of my stories, I certainly could, but just from thinking about it, none of them seem like there'd really be any point in swapping genders. Even with many of them featuring lesbian relationships, the fact that they're gay and female rarely has anything to do with the plot; the plot wouldn't change if both or even one of them (making the relationship heterosexual) were gender-swapped.

2. Certainly. All I care about is an interesting character; I'm not drawn or averted from works based on the gender of the protagonist or other characters.

Could I swap my character's gender? What did David Bowie say, playing Tesla in The Prestige? It was something like "Nothing is impossible, only expensive."

For the right price, I could always try.

I'm not sure I could swap their genders even if I wanted to. My characters come to me with their gender, orientation, race ect. already set. Some of my ideas have themes dealing with race that I can't do if I make a character a different race or even a different gender. If I write a story where one of the themes is machismo as it relates to Black men, then it would be near impossible for the primary character not to be a Black male for me. I could touch on it if my MC was a Black/mixed female, but it wouldn't be to the extent that I had wanted even if the female was a mom raising a son.

Same as if I write a story about being LGBT in the Black community, the story would be best served most likely by me having the MC be Black/mixed and LGBT unless I'm writing something from the POV of a family member or friend watching said character navigate such issues.

Calliea said:

I got two questions/ponderings.

1.Or could you turn your boys into girls or girls into boys and carry on with the story?

2. When you read a novel, do you need a character your own gender to empathize with

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1) In 1970s SF there were a good number of tales where a character would get literally gender-swapped (voluntarily or not, and sometimes more than once) in mid-novel or mid-series. Ian Wallace told me that his Croyd character "hated being female" which was probably half the motivation for writing it, to see how the character reacted as he 'carried on'.

As to my own stuff... in my SF Epic's nonhumans, there's not much gender differentiation (if you mentioned 'gender roles' they'd look at you funny), and a lot of the characters could be slid into the opposite gender without significant disruption. But then they wouldn't be quite themselves, and it would put an end to two of the political conflicts (unless I genderswapped them too... never fixate your line of succession on a specific gender, cuz sure as little green aliens, that's when your next generation of royalty will lack the one you need. )

In my old side project, my MC is a human gay male who treats businesslike women like men, and bimbo types like furniture. He could probably be genderswapped (along with his love interest) without changing much of anything, tho she'd have to be a strapping lass ... to survive a dozen rounds at the snuff arena.

2) No. For a character to relate to, I don't care about their gender (or lack/multiplicity of it) one way or the other, for MCs or side characters -- so long as they are whoever they are, and weren't stuffed in sideways to demonstrate how gender-fair the author is. They just have to be well-drawn characters and believable in context.***

This is becoming a pet peeve with me -- that increasingly, MCs are female just to prove that they can be, rather than because it's the natural thing for that character. Female MC who is purely herself, no problem. But if it feels like she's there to prove a point, back on the shelf it goes.

I'd strongly suggest perusing pretty much anything by Cherryh or Bujold for examples of good solid female characters (MCs and side characters) who simply are what they are, rather than being there "because we need more good female characters".

*** Honor Harrington is my prime bad example... yeah, first woman commander in her military, pioneering for women in her universe, and all that. That would have been fine. But in just the couple books I read she did so much stupid crap that if she'd been male she'da been smacked upside the head and drummed out for incompetence. This took the believability right out of it. If you're striving for fairness, be fair, don't give out indulgences.

While I agree with everyone who has said that changing a character's gender, sex, or sexual orientation changes the story, I've still found this to be an invaluable trick to "find" a fuzzy secondary character after a first draft. Oh, this guy reads like generic brogrammer / exposition device? Well, try the scene with that character as a woman and it will read really differently, with different tensions. And then maybe some of the dialogue and blocking would need to change to show the other characters reacting to those tensions, and some later scenes will change too, and all of a sudden this character who was just a paper-thin plot element is able to suggest interiority and add texture to the surrounding characters and the plot. Particularly since secondary and tertiary characters are more likely to have walked in from central casting with all of your subconscious baggage about their identities.

Most recently, I took a character's overbearing father and ailing mother and combined them into an overbearing, ailing mother, and both halves of the relationship became more complex and more focused: his reactions to the overbearing half were now tinged with guilt, and his reactions to the ailing half were now tinged with resentment, before I even rewrote anything. Of course, I then had to rewrite a bunch of scenes, but those scenes are stronger now. Different story? Yeah. Better, too.

BethS said:

1. No. If I changed the gender of any of my characters, they would not be the same person and the story would change.

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I had a project involving 3 siblings, 2 male, one female, that was kind of limping along. My agent suggested I make one of the men a woman, and I did. My thought was to change the name and the pronouns, but keep the character pretty much the same. Didn't work that way. The character grew and developed in different ways, and she has become my favorite character in the manuscript so far.

As for the second question, it doesn't make a difference.

1. Totally depends on the societies I'm writing about. If I'm writing about my warrior matriarchy, then no, I can't change anyone's gender, because it would completely change their social conditioning and make them a different character. But I have changed the genders of characters from my equal societies a number of times, including MCs. I believe gender is entirely a creation of society, so whether it makes a difference is a function of my world-building.

2. No, the gender of the characters make no difference to me as a reader.

I like to read sci-fi and fantasy but really stick to just writing fantasy, as a disclaimer.

1. I haven't, but I am very certain the only reason I haven't is because I won't
(not can't) wrap my head around it. As far as I can tell, it would either not affect the story or even, perhaps, make it stronger, but the characters are who they are and my brain won't let me see them as anyone else. This has been a lesson to me to make sure that I'm really using the proper genders for my characters when I start to develop a new story, and to be very aware that the story doesn't fall into the easy tropes and roles.

2. I'll identify with any well-written character, but I wish there were more females out there for me. And females in roles that aren't "feminine," as a good amount of research is beginning to indicate that gender roles were not as historically strict as we like to believe they are. Now, I don't like women that are added and feel like an afterthought, or "This is a Strong Female Character!" I just want good, well-written characters that happen to be ladies.

1. Yes, I can and have gender-swapped. Several times in the brainstorming stages, once with a secondary character after the first round of beta.

2. No, I don't need a character of my gender to relate to, and I often relate better to another gender than my own. But I want to echo what Putputt said:

Putputt said:

BUT if a book has a mostly-male cast and relegates nothing but flimsy, one-dimensional roles to the female characters, I will notice, and it will annoy me.

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Yes, this.

And even though I'm binary-gendered myself, I get super annoyed if genderqueer people are portrayed in an incredibly offensive/bizarre manner, or are specifically erased from existence. Like, I don't mind if a particular book is all male and female characters, but (and this happens not infrequently in SFF), if the author "makes up" genderqueer people as a SF concept and makes them all uniformly have some strange invented personality conceit, I'm going to be ticked off. Or if the book has a plot point that revolves around differentiating the entire world's population by male vs. female and doesn't address genderqueer people, I regard that as a severe fault in the worldbuilding.

And even though male characters have the power of position and ubiquity in fiction, I'd honestly be annoyed from a storytelling standpoint if the male characters were all flimsy and one-dimensional and only the female/genderqueer characters had personalities. It's just that I literally cannot think of a single example of that happening, and the reverse happens all. the. time.

Er, I seem to have strayed from the question. Tl;dr: I like all genders to have representation and personalities in fiction! Yay!

Kallithrix said:

Well, that's very idealistic and all, but we write about the real world, and in the real world, gender stereotypes and stereotyping exist

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Yah, but some of us write SFF

But of course even in SFF, I'll grant you that we're writing in the context of real world readers coming to it from modern-day society. And of our own entrenched perceptions. And certainly in all genres I think there's a huge difference between portraying a sexist/racist/otherwise problematic world and the narrative endorsing such things.

cf., a HF novel starring all men in which the women have zero agency, versus one starring women that does give them narrative agency (which doesn't have to contradict the sexism the writer has established in that world). As I suspect yours is.

But all of the above said, I do agree with this:

BethS said:

1. No. If I changed the gender of any of my characters, they would not be the same person and the story would change.

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Yes, my characters definitely change when I gender-swap them, particularly if they're interacting with an unequal society! And what the other characters say to them takes on different connotations, as well. For me that's part of the point of the genderswapping -- I often do it or consider doing it when a character isn't working right or developing properly, in order to shake the tree, so to speak, and see what falls out. Once I could not get the "wife" character of one of the leads to come to life until I took a step back and said, "why does it have to be a wife? why should the char be straight?" and then suddenly everything worked.

My minor characters tend to be the opposite sex to the main character who is speaking to them. It's just easier to understand who is talking if I can say say he said/she said rather than he said and then he said.
I'm hoping that when I get betterer at writing, I won't need this crutch so much.

I wrote a hetero romance a few years ago, and after two full drafts, something still didn't work. Then it dawned on me that the story might work better as a male/male romance. So I turned the male character's attention to a different band member, and suddenly the story worked. To this day, I'm not sure why it needed to be a gay romance (I was writing hetero and gay romances at the time), but it did, so I ran with it.

These days, I write hetero, bisexual, gay, lesbian, and trans* romance, and sometimes I'll ask myself if a pairing/grouping would work better in a different configuration. Most of the time, though, the story is pretty firmly in my head as a straight romance, a gay romance, etc.

All of that said, I don't need a character to be of the same gender as me in order to empathize. I just need them to not be stupid. (As in, "too stupid to live", people whose actions make ZERO sense on any level, etc)

I've switched secondary characters before, but never switched an MC.

I'm really tempted to do an experiment someday, though - I wan't to write the same setup several different times, with different characters/different genders in each version.

Like, just an example setup, say MC1 returns home after a long absence and discovers that previously hated MC2 has taken over the MC1 family business. And then, 'cause I write romance, romance ensues.

I feel like the cliche sexes for that setup would be MC1 female, MC2 male. So I could write a novella like that, and then switch it around - MC1 male, MC2 female. Then both male, and then, if I wanted to try some f/f, both female.

I don't know if it would work. I might want to try a setup that was a little less cliche to start with? Or maybe not, maybe that would be part of the game.

(Damn, it would be fun to co-author something like that, too - same setup for everyone, but they can pick their own character sexes and take the rest of the story in whatever direction they wanted. I'd read an anthology of those stories, I think...)

If I could, I think it would mean I have a lousy, not true to life character.

1) No, not with the major characters. They would be different people if that happened.

Perhaps I could change the gender of a very minor character, but I see no reason to do that.

2) No, I've never cared at all about what gender the characters are. It's the shared humanity that draws my empathy into a story, not the gender.

For me, it probably depends on the story and character in question. My current story revolves around a protagonist who is an exile because he's discovered a terrible secret, and he's been warped by a dark magic. But this is against the backdrop of his being from a rather patriarchal society, one that's taken a toll on him because he never really fit the mold of "maleness" that his society championed (partly why he experimented with the magic to begin with), and he ends up fleeing to a place that's less patriarchal, and he has to figure out where he fits in (though this is sort of in the background, it is a part of the story). Overall, he's happier in his new home, but he has to set aside some of his norms and expectations.

I could reverse it, I suppose. A female protag getting kicked from a matriarchal society for the same reason, one where she doesn't really fit in, and moving to one that's less strongly so, and having to give up some of her notions (like learning to trust others and ask for help, and realizing that women don't always have to be the strong protectors who never screw anything up), but then it would probably be more of a satire.

I have a couple of secondary characters whose genders (and/or sexual orientations) could possibly be changed, but I don't feel a really strong need to do this. And they came to me as the people they are.

Come to think of it, most of the story ideas I have do include some themes related to gender, even if they're running below the surface. So the main characters end up being the gender they are for a reason.

This does not mean that I think male and female are non-overlapping in terms of personalities or abilities, and that female characters must be one way and male another way. But the way one (regardless of whether one's personality particularly aligns with a gender stereotype or not) fits into one's society as a male or female of their given orientation seems to factor into many of my stories. So it's not usually easy for me to do a swap, at least not for major characters.

I don't really care if a protagonist of a story is male or female. I can relate to either. However, I do notice if a story completely lacks one gender or the other when there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. For instance, I was critting a story a while back that was about a mage rebellion, and even though the rebels were rallying around a hidden female heir to the throne, not a single one of them was a woman. I asked the person who'd written the story if there was a reason in his world that women didn't have any magic or weren't allowed to be trained in it, and he actually slapped his forehead and said, no, of course there were female wizards. He just hadn't thought about showing any.

That's the problem, really. Not people who choose to make a character one gender or the other because it fits their story best to have the character be that gender, but people who ignore half the human race because most of the books they read growing up did the same thing and they just think that's normal. Or people who assume that just because a story does take place in a patriarchal society, that means there can't possibly be any interesting women living in it.

I tend to use the image of someone violating another person's personal space. Because of that, I think gender does play a role. But I do not let that define the story as such. The story could exist without the gender being specific to one character or another, but I am not sure I would want to necessarily fool with the gender of any of my main characters. But, I am also more of a 'character' versus 'plot' writer so I let them tell me what they need to exist on the page and if that is a particular gender then, I am not apt to mess with that aspect of their lives. If I wrote based on a structured plot then I think gender would be less of a data point and thus more changeable.

Because of cultural gender perceptions, and author crushes, I think gender-swapping is an excellent exercise for many writers.

If you're struggling with a character, and imagine this character as a hot example of the gender you crush on, you may find this character suddenly saying and doing more awesome things.

On the other hand, if you imagine your 'hot' character as the gender you don't crush on, you may suddenly realize they are a dick, bitch, weenie, et cetera, and not nearly as cool as you thought.

When a character can work as both a man or women, and be equally compelling either way, that character is probably a damn good character ... a character that happens to be human first, and male/female second.

When I first think of a story idea, some characters come already-formed as male or female. Sometimes the story premise dictates it, such as the novella I've recently completed in which motherhood is a key theme, so that does dictate a female lead. But in some cases they could have gone either way. One recent short story of mine - last year's Solstice Swap, as it happens - has a male first-person lead who during the main action of the story is fifteen. He could have been a girl, but I decided to write a boy for a change as my six previous short stories had all had female leads. But once I have established the character in my head he or she won't change. I hate having to change a character's name once I've settled on one, let alone their sex. As someone said above, they would be different people if I did and it would be a different story.

As a reader, I'll read books and stories about men and women equally. If the author has done his/her job properly, I'll be interested in the characters whoever they are.

1. I just flipped the sex of all the characters in my novel after writing the first 60 pages. Amazing what it does to the character dynamics, but the story is unchanged.

2. I don't even think about it.

Brutal Mustang said:

Because of cultural gender perceptions, and author crushes, I think gender-swapping is an excellent exercise for many writers.

If you're struggling with a character, and imagine this character as a hot example of the gender you crush on, you may find this character suddenly saying and doing more awesome things.

On the other hand, if you imagine your 'hot' character as the gender you don't crush on, you may suddenly realize they are a dick, bitch, weenie, et cetera, and not nearly as cool as you thought.

When a character can work as both a man or women, and be equally compelling either way, that character is probably a damn good character ... a character that happens to be human first, and male/female second.

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That might work in romance, I don't know, but I've never written a "hot" character in my life, and never intend to. I see enough of that in TV shows and moves where every character looks like a choice for "sexiest" person of the year.

I also don't write human first and male/female second because that makes no sense to me whatsoever.

screenscope said:

1. I just flipped the sex of all the characters in my novel after writing the first 60 pages. Amazing what it does to the character dynamics, but the story is unchanged.

2. I don't even think about it.

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The only way I could do this would be to rewrite every character from the ground up. I don't write unisex characters who can be switched at will, I write characters who are male, or are female, and can't be anything else.

1. I suppose I could swap the gender of my MC. I don't think I'd want to, because I've lived with him in my head for so long that he kind of has his own apartment in there, and turning him into a woman would be...weird. But it wouldn't totally destroy the books. I'd just have to gender-swap a couple of the other characters (or make them gay) and I'd be okay, I think.

2. Whether I can empathize with a character has more to do with what they do than what gender they are. I don't like victimized female characters, or even female characters where their "femaleness" is emphasized too much (that is to say, more than a male character's "maleness" is). But if they're strong, competent, and preferably snarky (example from TV: Kate Stewart from Doctor Who) then I can empathize just fine. I have preference for male characters, but I enjoy both.

Jamesaritchie said:

The only way I could do this would be to rewrite every character from the ground up. I don't write unisex characters who can be switched at will, I write characters who are male, or are female, and can't be anything else.

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I agree. In my case, the story is much better served by the change.

Brutal Mustang said:

When a character can work as both a man or women, and be equally compelling either way, that character is probably a damn good character ... a character that happens to be human first, and male/female second.

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Same goes for me.

Because I don't understand how you can't switch the genders, I really can't. I mean, does the male character constantly check out the females? Are they in the the army or something, are they gruff, do they curse, etc? How wouldn't that work for a woman? Obv, you can switch the gender they're attracted to if you want.

Makes me wonder if they people who can't gender switch just haven't met enough people or their cultural gender roles are so inundated that they can't separate it from the person. I've met soft-spoken, cooing fathers, I've met mothers who curse and smoke and whup their kids. Gender didn't get in the way of their personality nor their sexuality.

I mean no disrespect, I'd love this explained.

Even if the story was in 19th-century Victorian England and was about a woman who was being forced to marry in order to save her family's wealth, she could work as a male. Just make his family a little more domineering and him more of a B-personality and it could work. Little tweaks can go a long way. No gender switch is instant, you have to edit the story to make it work. But you'd be surprised how few scenes you need to change.