Changing gender of mc

I personally haven't. But, hey, why not?

I've been known to change things around a little, mostly with secondary characters. For me it's a way of examining my own biases (although I still miss a lot, I'm sure!).

I've done this in poems more than once. I see some things more clearly when I switch up POV.

You might want to check out this thread :

Could you swap your characters' gender at will?

Wow, I'd forgotten about this, but I did do this! Not with the main character, but with the 2nd most important character--s/he was the only other character with a POV.

I realized I'd set up a dynamic where a lot of the plot turned on Main Character protecting Second Main Character (who was a member of a persecuted group.) It became his deepest motivation for all his actions in the third act.

They were both male.

Wow, I'm really worried about sounding sexist here...

... but the truth is, you take a quite young heterosexual male (at least an extremely average one such as my main character, who was already set in stone) and the way you're going to get the strongest protective instinct toward someone to take over his whole being is... he's in love with her. You're not going to get the same intensity through friendship, and he's (sadly) likely going to feel kind of weird about having all that much protective intensity toward another guy anyhow.

So, I took my second male character whom I'd already worked up and made him into a young woman. The core of who he was so far was "determined person of action who cares about and at a young age already helps support his family"--that really gave me a good framework for a strong female character thankfully, and I love her, she's one of my favorite characters now. And after all was said and done with the protective instinct she absolutely rescued herself. (The protectiveness was actually needed to trigger a different chain of events, though it happened through his attempts at rescuing her.)

One of the best decisions I ever made but it was tough to make it, I'd written some good scenes with the male character that just had to go (lots of the details wouldn't transfer over, men & women didn't work the same kinds of jobs in that time period etc.)

The link in Marian's post is 4 years old, but still interesting.

There is still a lot of debate about innate gender differences vs. socialized ones and about the significance of traits where the genders differ on average, but when said traits are not terribly useful for predicting the personalities of individuals. No one is "all female" or "all male" when it comes to genderized trait distribution.

Personally, I've had an easier time flipping genders for secondary characters than for primary ones. I've though, however, of rewriting a novel I never got anywhere with and changing the gender of the two main characters. It would involve doing more than simply changing their names and pronouns, of course, because even though their world isn't like ours with regards to gender (inheritance is more commonly matrilineal, for one thing, and there is more variation in family structure tolerated within the culture in question), it's still not entirely gender neutral. Gender norms are fairly flexible, but still, a person's gender has some consequences in terms of the things that are expected of them and (generally) in terms of what they expect of themselves.

A tale that explores what it is, specifically, to be a man or woman in a given time or place in the so-called real world wouldn't be a great candidate, perhaps. Nor would a story where a real time and place's concept of what it is to be male or female is central to a person's sense of self and where that gendered sense of self is part of what drives the story.

I will note, however, that even in the four years since the earlier thread, it seems to me that western society (or at least some segments thereof) is gradually coming to accept that gender isn't a binary thing either. We're a long way, though, from a person's gender being of no consequence or concern to themselves or to others.

The flipping question applies to other (non gender) demographics too, of course. Imo, whether it works or not depends on the story itself and on how much a writer is willing to alter certain things (if not the character's personality and actions, at least the way some other people might react to them) and on the kind of world in which the story takes place.

I believe that Ripley was changed from male to female in the production of Alien without any changes to the script, but this might have been in response to Weaver's audition. I'm not sure. But it shows that a realistic male character is really not all that different to a realistic female character with a similar personality. Obviously in fiction you dig deeper into a character's inner world, and given the power we give gender roles and conformity, some of what a character thinks and how they act with people of the same or different genders may have to change. But there's no reason you can't flip.

Roxxsmom said:

Imo, whether it works or not depends on the story itself and on how much a writer is willing to alter certain things (if not the character's personality and actions, at least the way some other people might react to them) and on the kind of world in which the story takes place.

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Exactly. I think it's possible to flip as in, take "my heroine is reserved and resourceful and very focused on making money" and give these traits to a man instead.

But it's not possible as in, take "my heroine was discovered with a man she wasn't married to, and her reputation was ruined, so she has to earn a living since no respectable man will marry her" and make that plausibly happen to a man, unless this becomes an alternate history and I create a world where men are expected to be virgins until marriage. It's not just a matter of personality, but also of plots that depend on gender, and how people of different genders have been treated differently.

I've switched genders and races for characters, because sometimes making those little changes adds complexity to a character that was previously missing.

I gender swapped a secondary character. The MC is at school and I noticed I had too many male teachers. As this is an ordinary state comprehensive in London, you'd expect roughly a 50/50 gender split with teachers so I gender swapped one of them. The one I gender swapped was originally Mr Davies, a Welsh PE teacher who loves rugby, is not so enthusiastic about teaching other sports that are not rugby and loves ribbing the students every time Wales beats England at rugby. All I did was change Mr to Ms and the relevant pronouns. Absolutely everything else about the character stayed the same. It also fixed a problem because he was a bit of a stereotype (rugby-mad Welsh guy) - not a negative one but still a stereotype. But by gender swapping this character she seems much less of a stereotype now. Or at least only a partial stereotype not a total one.

Albedo said:

I believe that Ripley was changed from male to female in the production of Alien without any changes to the script, but this might have been in response to Weaver's audition. I'm not sure. But it shows that a realistic male character is really not all that different to a realistic female character with a similar personality. Obviously in fiction you dig deeper into a character's inner world, and given the power we give gender roles and conformity, some of what a character thinks and how they act with people of the same or different genders may have to change. But there's no reason you can't flip.

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That's what I've always been led to believe. And I agree that in a lot of genres and circumstances you can swap a character's gender easily and writing a good female character's no different to writing a good male character.

It wouldn't be straight forward if the character's in a situation where social attitudes and gender expectations would have an impact on them. For example my female PE teacher wouldn't be realistic for a story set in London in the 1970s because the idea of having a female PE teacher teach rugby to children of both genders would have been unheard of due to sexist attitudes at the time. You might get a story about such a teacher trying to campaign for girls to be allowed to play rugby in school PE but she would've faced a crap ton of resistance and difficulty and been expected to stick to teaching netball and other sports traditionally considered to be for women - it would be a radically different story and you wouldn't be able to just gender swap a male PE teacher without making radical changes. However, for schools today, it's not unrealistic, albeit it's probably still fairly rare and people would comment on it - generally in a positive way. My story's set in 2055. The PE teacher gender swap helps to establish that gender stereotypes are a thing of the past as literally no-one in the entire story bats an eyelid about a female PE teacher coaching the year 11, 12 and 13 boys' rugby teams.

Oh, intriguing. I have not gender-swapped any characters, but it's interesting to think about whether I could and what that would entail.

For the most part, I think the answer is going to be no, I can't gender-swap my characters because they're in historical settings, and of course gender roles were much stricter in the Victorian age (Lord, I have a love-hate relationship with the Victorians...). The Edwardians were worse, if anything. I have characters whose trajectories would've been impossible if society didn't treat women as it did at that time period. I also have a few WIPs about real people, and it would be super trippy to gender-swap those characters! A gender-swapped Marie-Antoinette anyone? (Actually, she doesn't make an appearance in the WIP, but her presence is very felt--fun to ponder, though. Oh man, that would make her Marc Antony, would it?)

But I'm all for exploring what gender (and sexuality) mean to the characters, whatever time period they live in. How is gender viewed by the world at large? How is that view ingrained in your character's psyche? What does it mean to him/her to conform or not conform? How do they wrestle with the cost-benefit analysis of what they want and what other people want them to be?

angeliz2k said:

For the most part, I think the answer is going to be no, I can't gender-swap my characters

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I think you (generic you) could, just as you could theoretically change the characters' sexual orientation or ethnicity. The question for me is, would this make the story more interesting, or plausible, or marketable?

I have characters whose trajectories would've been impossible if society didn't treat women as it did at that time period.

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I have a historical romance manuscript where the hero, out of sympathy, agrees to marry a woman because she was seduced by the antagonist and is now pregnant. To me, this was an example of characters who can't be successfully genderswapped. One of the suggestions on the thread I linked to was that they could be, so the story would be about a heroine who marries a man who impregnated another woman, and she has to raise the illegitimate child.

But this doesn't take the nature of Victorian England into consideration. No such things as paternity tests, so how could the man be certain that the child was his? If he simply did not claim responsibility, what would the unmarried pregnant woman do - take him to court to get child support?

In 1890, the consequences for a man fathering an illegitimate child were so much less than for a woman carrying one that it also made no sense, in the genderswapped scenario, for the heroine to offer to marry him so she could give the child legitimacy and protect his reputation. Not to mention that it's easy for a male antagonist to seduce a woman as part of a scheme, but carries considerably more personal risk for a female antagonist to get pregnant for the same reason (and why this female antagonist would then hand the child over to the heroine and her husband is anyone's guess, whereas if the antagonist is male, he has no choice about it).

But I'm all for exploring what gender (and sexuality) mean to the characters, whatever time period they live in. How is gender viewed by the world at large? How is that view ingrained in your character's psyche? What does it mean to him/her to conform or not conform? How do they wrestle with the cost-benefit analysis of what they want and what other people want them to be?

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Great questions. Even if the characters need to be a certain gender for the story being told, and for the time and the setting, the issues you mentioned could be explored in a way that deepens the story. I don't think genderswapping is necessary to achieve this.