Gender Swapped Fairy Tales

Why hasn’t this been done before? Gender Swapped Fairy Tales, by illustrator and author Karrie Fransman and creative technologist Jonathan Plackett, is such a simple but brilliant idea. But harder to execute than first thought apparently.

The idea began when their daughter was born and they first imagined using a basic search and replace algorithm to swap pronouns around . But they discovered: “oddities in the English language meant an artificial intelligence was necessary to detect the context of the sentence and to apply the language accordingly.”

In her interview with Creative Review, Fransman described how many periphery elements in stories are gendered:

“Even the kingdom becomes a queendom, and a hen is now a rooster, and it’s all really tiny little things littered in the language. Brothers and sisters turned into sisters and brothers, and women were now introduced by their professions – they’ll say ‘miller and her husband’ – and they’re introduced first as well.”

What better demonstrates the extent to which gendered thinking and attitudes are embedded in our language and lives.