Fausterella

More genderswitching: Miss Shirley Holmes

I have been genderswitching again. A short story this time: A Scandal in Bohemia, by Arhur Conan Doyle. Here is the genderswitched version: below are my comments on it, and on the process in general.

I didn’t really write up the experience of genderswitching Pride and Prejudice, although it involved a few interesting questions, some of which also come up in this story. For example, titles. The easiest thing would have been to swap Mr. for Ms. all through, but I preferred to use Miss. and Mrs. to be more in keeping with the period. This inevitably led to using Master and Mr. as replacements for Miss. and Mrs. (A custom I would be fascinated to see revived, at least for men who insist on mocking the use of Ms. as a title. Let them find out what it’s like to have everyone know your marital status.)

More difficult, in a way, were military and other titles. Colonel Foster in Pride and Prejudice remains Colonel Foster in Prejudice and Pride, because Colonel is a gender-neutral title. Except that in practice, people think of colonels as male, which meant the genderswitch was annoyingly less obvious. The same is true for Dr Watson. I couldn’t bring myself to call her Mrs Watson – a doctor is a doctor – so Dr Watson she remains. Doctors, these days, have lost some of their assumed maleness, but Dr Watson is known to be male, and because he is telling the story, his gender is not mentioned very much. Therefore I decided that in my version, when Shirley Holmes addressed Dr Watson familiarly, she would address her as Jane (Watson’s original forename being John). I considered making Jane Watson address Miss Holmes as Shirley, but decided that Miss Holmes better expressed the relationship.

In Prejudice and Pride, the one thorny problem I encountered was towards the end of the book, where Mrs Bennet describes Mrs Wickham as “as fine a fellow as ever I saw”. There is simply no good female equivalent of “fellow”, particularly in this sense, where the word is meant pejoratively. In the end I used ‘personage’ – not ideal, but it was simply impossible to use ‘woman’ or ‘lady or ‘girl’. “As fine a lady as ever I saw” just doesn’t sound insulting at all.

In A Scandal in Bohemia the problem was facial hair. One character is described as ‘moustached’, another as ‘side-whiskered’. Now, I could postulate that in this genderswitched world women grow facial hair*, but it undermined the picture I was trying to present.** So I replaced the words with ‘glossy-haired and ‘dirty-faced’ respectively.

One more interesting point, which comes up in A Scandal in Bohemia and will also turn up in my next genderswitching extract: I had expected my process to create a matriarchy rather than a patriarchy within the world of the books, and it did; I had not realised I was also going create a pagan rather than Christian universe. But of course, once you change ‘God and ‘priest’ for ‘[the] Goddess’ and ‘priestess’ you’re giving quite a different visual image and context.

Which reminds me: the name of the royal personage in A Scandal in Bohemia was originally Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein. Wilhelm easily became Wilhelmina; I searched German baby name sites to find Sigesmunde for Sigismond; but I was briefly stymied by Gottreich until I realised it meant God’s realm and must therefore become Göttinsreich – Goddess’s realm.

It is also thanks to A Scandal in Bohemia that I know now the male equivalent of a prima donna is a primo uomo.

One more point, a telling one I think: I found myself, during the genderswitching of A Scandal in Bohemia, thinking: “What a lot of women there are in this story!”

Finally, I must thank the commentator who pointed me to regender.com – it doesn’t replace the process of manually genderswitching (and I wouldn’t want it to – I’m only doing this because I enjoy it!) but it certainly helps things along.

*Of course, women do grow facial hair. But you know what I mean.
** I still haven’t quite decided whether in a genderswitched universe, men have the babies. I think they probably do.