Over the summer I had the chance to see a local production of “Julius Caesar” where Marc Anthony was played by a woman and Calpurnia, Caesar’s spouse, was played by a man. In both cases the characters were referred to by the gender of their actors so Anthony was a woman and Caesar had a husband. This changed the play not at all because neither of their roles have essentially anything to do with the sex nor gender of the characters.
However, Portia, Brutus’s wife, was played by a woman. Portia has a number of critical lines within the play that directly address her history as a woman within a male-dominated society. Contrast this with Calpurnia whose roll has little directly to do with the character being a woman but instead focuses on the character’s relationship with Caesar.
I also saw “A Midsummer Night's Dream” where Ariel was played by a man, but that change is a little different because the character is a spirit, not a person.
I have no doubt that a skilled company could easily adopt Portia’s role to be man’s role, but it would require significant reworking of the character. Totally possible but a much more significant change than Anthony or Calpurnia changing gender.
From this, I hazard swapping gender or race or whatever in characters is dependent on how relevant that attribute is to the character. Staying with the Bard, changing Othello to a white man would dramatically change the play, assuming the rest of the characters are white. Changing Othello to be Asian would require change, but less significant. Whereas changing Iago to be a woman probably doesn’t matter at all because the character of Othello is defined by his race but Iago is not defined by his gender.
So let’s say there’s a swap of Crispus Atticus from “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Making Atticus black, while again retaining the race for most other characters, dramatically changes the story. If you made Atticus Asian, it would still change the story significantly. Make Atticus a woman and the core of the story would not change.
In other words, it’s all contextual. Which means there’s a lot of room for people to disagree on this. Someone can probably say that it’s critical that Calpurnia be a woman. Sure. Everyone is welcome to their opinions, but you have to say why Calpurnia must be a woman to have some cred there. Some arguments are likely better considered than others in that regard; someone who says Calpurnia must be a woman because of traditional gender roles in society generally is making a different argument than someone who pulls Calpurnia’s lines and discusses why these lines only make sense coming from a woman.
If you're going to genderswap historical figures, you'd better have a DAMN good reason. Same-sex marriage was not accepted in the Roman aristocracy, so that in itself elicits an eyeroll reaction from me. And if you're going to show Marc Antony as a woman, my mind is going to extrapolate to the rest of the Julio-Claudian family tree and I'd probably get exasperated enough to get up and leave ('cause if Marc Antony was female, how did Antonia Major and Minor get born - they were Original Antony's daughters by Octavia, so is Octavia supposed to be a man now?)
A notable pop culture occurrence swap of gender and race from the original occurs in the 2021 “Dune” movie. In the book, Liet Kynes is a male from the majority culture of imperial society (presumably white) but in the recent movie, Kynes is a woman and is Freman. The change to Kynes’s gender is irrelevant to the story because Kynes as a character is not defined by gender. However, Kynes becoming a Freman is a significant change. In both the book and the movie, Kynes has feet in two world, being welcomed both by the city-dwelling imperials and by the native Freman. In the book, Kynes is a character who became enamored of the Freman cause after coming to the planet Dune. In the movie, where Kynes is a Freman, she is instead a Freman who rose into imperial society. For Kynes, the material change was to the character’s race because that’s part of the character’s story; the change to Kynes’s gender is irrelevant.
In the book, Kynes is the SON of Pardot Kynes, the Imperial Planetologist. Pardot marries a Fremen woman in order to attain a position of belonging among the people of Sietch Tabr, so that makes his SON - Liet - half-Fremen and half-notFremen. Liet, in HIS turn, marries a Fremen woman named Faroula, and they have a daughter named Chani. Faroula dies when Chani is a child, and since Liet is busy most of the time, Chani is basically raised in Stilgar's
yali (his household). Stilgar and Liet have a relationship akin to blood-brotherhood, so Stilgar is considered a kind of uncle to Chani.
This is in the book. It's in the Encyclopedia. It's partly in the Lynch movie. Yet there are so many people ranting that there's no proof of any relationship at all between Liet-Kynes and Chani, so who cares if Kynes is genderswapped?
I guess the line (in both novel and Lynch movie): "I am Chani, daughter of Liet" somehow isn't proof enough. There's a sadly-deleted scene in the Lynch movie in which it's plainly stated that Chani's FATHER, Liet, was killed. Later on, when Paul and Chani are alone, they observe that one thing they have in common is that they've both lost a father to the Harkonnens.
So no, this pointless genderswap doesn't work for me.
Just because there are meaningful changes from the original doesn’t mean those changes should be avoided. The character of Kynes in the movie works just fine as a Freman versus as an off-world imperial. Yes, the essence of the character is changed by the race swap, but that change isn’t relevant to the whole of the narrative. It’s not to say that Kynes’s race is irrelevant, but that the character works either way.
I'm going to reiterate this point, because I've been called racist for being against this female Kynes. I honestly do not care what color this actress' skin is. My point is that Liet-Kynes not supposed to be female. He is supposed to be male, for reasons I have already stated MANY times.
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