Recommendation: Regender
A recommends…
Regender
Webservice
Webservice
Regender.com “translates” web pages by switching gender words.
Have you ever wondered…
What would the world look like if the two sexes switched places?
What would it look like if English had genderless pronouns?
What would it look like if English identified races the way it identifies gender?Language has power.
Posted by Zory on April 29th, 2010 at 08:00 am
Category: recommendations, websites 9 comments »
April 29th, 2010 at 10:31 am |
Very cool. It’d be even more awesome if this was used for a more heavily gender-inflected language like Spanish or German.
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April 29th, 2010 at 10:44 am |
This is wicked awesome. I agree with Milo. It would be cool to see this in a very gendered language.
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April 29th, 2010 at 11:51 am |
I just did it with genderfork. That was interesting.
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April 29th, 2010 at 11:59 am |
…clearly highlighting the limitations of language.
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April 29th, 2010 at 11:40 pm |
I think English is very gendered, it’s just more sneaky about it. We’ve got certain adjectives that only get applied to specific genders. How many men are called “shrill”, “promiscuous”, or “wicked”? How different is the subtext and attitude behind calling someone of either sex a “bitch” and calling them an “asshole”?
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April 29th, 2010 at 11:43 pm |
PS. This is awesome.
I wish I had the resources to create an interactive virtual-reality art exhibit that does this face-to-face. Performance capture on several volunteers who converse with each other in a virtual space where their actions are mapped onto characters of the “opposite” sex. Kind of a way to show cis people the changes in treatment trans people experience regularly.
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April 30th, 2010 at 2:44 am |
J – YES
Maybe you don’t personally have the resources but think outside the box and see if you know someone who does and who knows what could happen…
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April 30th, 2010 at 2:07 pm |
First stop – Biblegateway.com!
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May 2nd, 2010 at 11:12 am |
I decided to read “My Side of the Mountain,” a young adult book that I loved growing up, aloud to my partner. If you haven’t read it, it’s about a young boy who decides to leave home and be self-sufficient and live in the mountains. About 10 pages in, when Sam’s pronouns are used for the first time, my partner was like, “Wait–Sam is a boy? I thought that was a girl on the cover?” So we decided to read it with all female pronouns instead of male. Now when my partner recalls this book, Sam IS a female character. I like that.
Some sentences were especially interesting, like when the dad chuckles at Sam’s plans to live in the mountains: “Go ahead, daughter. Every girl should try it once.”
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