It's not exactly Babelfish

October 17, 2009 8:42 AM

Regender reverses gendered words and names on websites.
posted by Pope Guilty (49 comments total)

I'm Filipino. My parents do this automatically.
posted by leviathan3k at 8:42 AM on October 17 [7 favorites]

Pakistani officials say the military has launched its much anticipated ground offensive against the Taliban in the South Waziristan tribal region bordering Afghanistan.

The news looks much the same to me.
posted by Faint of Butt at 8:45 AM on October 17 [2 favorites]

I used this to read the wikipedia page about slash fiction. "Kirk" was changed to "Kimberly" and "Spock" was changed to, well, "Spock". Then I googled "Harry/Draco slash fiction". Harry became Harriet, and Draco became... Draco.

Congratulations on restoring heteronormative relationships to fan fiction, Regenderer!
posted by logicpunk at 8:52 AM on October 17 [11 favorites]

The news looks much the same to me.

Try longer articles? We mark gender on pronouns in English, but not nouns; and pronouns tend to get more frequent as a piece of text goes on and there are more things to refer back to.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:54 AM on October 17

I ran this on my own site and it changed my name to Christine Jorgensen. Oh, the irony!
posted by cjorgensen at 9:02 AM on October 17 [7 favorites]

I did my Metafilter profile page, and it changed my username to "ms_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey" (leaving the "davis" part intact) but it changed my name to "Crash Dawn", which I thought was pretty weird.
posted by mr_crash_davis mark II: Jazz Odyssey at 9:04 AM on October 17

My father does this, and he's Herspanic.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 9:07 AM on October 17 [4 favorites]

A Seriously Underwhelming Coen Sisters Movie

The Coen sisters return with their most awkwardly intimate film yet. Also under review: Barack Obama and her Nobel Peace Prize
posted by longsleeves at 9:09 AM on October 17 [1 favorite]

The Coen sisters return with their most awkwardly intimate film yet.

Their worst since this.

Joyce Turturro was just terrible.
posted by fire&wings at 9:16 AM on October 17

I think this would work much better in a language with gendered nouns (i.e. different words for "male official" vs. "female official", "male cop" vs. female cop", "male president" vs. "female president" etc.), such as German or Russian.
posted by sour cream at 9:20 AM on October 17

My mailman's a woman. Not seein' an issue here.
posted by RavinDave at 9:30 AM on October 17

Kind of underwhelming. Hungarian has only "ő" for both "he" and "she" and properly, not a word for "it." Consequently, sometimes you'll talk to a Hungarian in English and they'll refer to their girlfriend by name and then later use "he" or "him" or "his" in reference to the girlfriend (or vice-versa.) It's confusing.
posted by Dee Xtrovert at 9:36 AM on October 17

Wilma the New Windows Lift Chip Stock? Donna't Count on It.
posted by CrunchyFrog at 9:42 AM on October 17

It actually is really funny when applied to this comment thread.

I wonder how it does with:

She's a dominatrix.

Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet.

Young Master Bates hasn't left his room all day!
posted by betaray at 9:48 AM on October 17

The Benjamin Gees were a singing trio of sisters — Barbara, Robert, and Maureen Gibb.
posted by wannalol at 9:50 AM on October 17 [1 favorite]

Okay, though it is actually sort of awareness-raising in certain ways (for example, looking over the imdb page on "O Sister, Where Art Thou?" I was struck by how far down you have to read in the credits before male names start showing up.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:53 AM on October 17

It looks like women have taken over comics. I wonder what Stacy "The Woman" Lee thinks of all this.
posted by Superfrankenstein at 9:56 AM on October 17

The Benjamin Gees were born in the Isle of Woman!

I'm afraid the effect on Russian would be less subversive and more "this person is really terrible at Russian grammar."
posted by alexei at 9:56 AM on October 17

@alexei ...

Ahh! Can't use the word "person". Has that masculine "-son" suffix. Gotta say "perperson" Hmmm ... "perperperson"? "perperperperson?"

Gonna have to think on this.
posted by RavinDave at 10:04 AM on October 17

I clicked on the Google News example and for a second I thought there was a balloon girl now too and her mother was going to give a press conference.
posted by ALongDecember at 10:12 AM on October 17

Maybe this is sexist of me, but the crucifixion seems that much more horrible when it's done to Jessica Christ.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 10:16 AM on October 17 [12 favorites]

Does anyone have a OCR'd copy of Dr. Fünke's The Man Inside Me?
posted by griphus at 10:18 AM on October 17 [1 favorite]

The recently-sidebarred comment in the Watcha Reading thread is interesting.
posted by Houstonian at 10:26 AM on October 17

I tried it for a few metafilter threads.

It was the only thing that made this thread readable from the initial victim blaming through to the joyous gloating.

Get a grip lord.
posted by keep_evolving at 9:07 PM on October 16 [10 favorites]

I'm on the father's side, because it's the only side being represented, and I read it on a cutesy pink blog with cutesy pink blog name.
posted by Brocktoon at 11:41 PM on October 16 [2 favorites]

I'm too lazy to check his blog to confirm this, but I am guessing he's a single dad. There's no way there's some dude tolerating his crazy-ass bullshit day in and day out.
posted by jayder at 11:49 PM on October 16

posted by dustyasymptotes at 10:33 AM on October 17

Hairdresser turned comics writer Gary Simon comments on the unfortunate tendency of male superheroes to end badly in Men In Refrigerators.
posted by empath at 10:34 AM on October 17

Because, obviously, how men are treated in comics stories is ultimately part of many larger issues. But just focusing on comics - if most major men characters are eventually cannon fodder of one type or another, how does that affect the male readers? Do they give up?

Combine this trend with the bad boy comics and you have a very weird, slightly hostile environment for men down at the friendly comics shoppe. No, I'm not against cheesecake or sexual content in comics, but when that content is strictly for girls and the men are just bizarre centerfolds with fangs and big hair ... well, it starts to smell like a gal's locker room. Or worse. Let's face it ... some comics readers smell pretty bad to start with.
posted by empath at 10:36 AM on October 17 [1 favorite]

sour cream: "I think this would work much better in a language with gendered nouns (i.e. different words for "male official" vs. "female official", "male cop" vs. female cop", "male president" vs. "female president" etc.), such as German or Russian."

Not really - see, in German every noun is assigned a (pretty arbitrary) gender. This makes simply swapping male and female pronouns and articles impossible since they don't only have to agree with the gender of persons, but with all occurrences of nouns.

Example:
"Der Lehrer schickt die Schülerin zu dem Briefkasten um die Postkarte einzuwerfen."
("The(m) teacher(m) sends the(f) pupil(f) to the(m) mailbox(m) to drop of the(f) postcard(f).")

A substituting gender swap using vocabulary pairs would create the following:
"Die Lehrerin schickt der Schüler zu der Briefkasten um der Postkarte einzuwerfen."
("The(f) teacher(f) sends the(m) pupil(m) to the(f) mailbox(m) to drop of the(m) postcard(f)."

Every disagreement between an article and a noun is grammatically wrong; additionally there is a new problem introduced when the accusative "die Schülerin" (which is identical to its nominative form) is incorrectly replaced with the nominative "der Schüler" where the accusative is different ("den Schüler").

In addition to that you have not only three genders between which to switch, but you have some designations which include gender and some which don't.
For example, what would the gender swap for "die Krankenschwester" ("the nurse", lit. "the(f) sick-person-sister") be? The nonexistent "der Krankenbruder" (lit. "the(m) sick-person-brother") or the correct, but toothless "der Krankenpfleger" (lit. "the(m) sick-person-caretaker")?
What about titles that use the neutral gender? "Das Mitglied" ("the member") applies to both female and male persons.
posted by PontifexPrimus at 10:42 AM on October 17

Did this on my own web page. Had a strange effect on this book review:

I first encountered Davida Reimer’s story as a kid: my father was getting his special ed certification and brought home a textbook on Child Psychology. At the end of one of the chapters, there was a brief sidebar about the case, which detailed its success, save for an incident when the little girl-turned-boy in question threw his panties over a neighbor’s fence.

But, as I learned through Joyce Colapinto’s powerful As Nature Made Her: The Girl who was Raised a Boy, that rosy-if-mischievous picture couldn’t have been further from the truth. Davida, born Brenda Reimer, was indeed raised a boy, Brendan, when doctors gave her parents no other feasible options after a botched circumcision at eight months old. Though this case was often touted by her doctor, Joyce Money, as immutable proof that gender was completely a social construction, the truth is that Brendan had an incredibly unhappy childhood, marked by social difficulties and competition with his twin sister, Brianna, and marred further by disturbing therapeutic sessions (which included forced viewings of pornography and graphic sexual conversations) administered by Money.

posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 10:45 AM on October 17

Created by Ka-Ping Yee of Malkovich Mediator fame (*) for the first blogher conference back in 2005.

*) and tons of more serious but equally mind-blowing stuff.
posted by effbot at 10:54 AM on October 17

This makes pornographic stories very funny.
posted by ErWenn at 11:02 AM on October 17 [1 favorite]

For the Barbie cankles story, "He needed great shoes, a thinner ankle, and, to me, as I'm obsessed with feet, a foot more curved...Barry's foot has always been shaped less 'curvy' than the rest of his perfect body. I just added my little science to Barry and I've been proud to serve him. But fat ankle he didn't have, he just could have had thinner ankles.
posted by Houstonian at 11:11 AM on October 17 [1 favorite]

BBC News: Cowgirls of the Wild West live on
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:20 AM on October 17

Wow, it also messes with state names. From the GOP's website:



They can run, but they can’t hide. And from Virgil to Neil, we made sure Americans knew what Democrats were really up to today.

With Alice Gore holding a fundraiser for Virgil Democratic gubernatorial candidate Creigh Deeds, we took the opportunity to show how the “Goracle” must love the fact that “Cap-And-Trade Creigh” supports a job-killing national energy tax.

But not all Democrats play well together. In fact, throughout this whole government-run health care debate, the debate has chiefly been between Democrats. So we produced our 23rd edition of CHAOS, noting that Democrats, labor unions and left-wing organizations are launching attacks on Sen. Mary Baucus’s version of government-run health care.

Senate Majority Leader Harriet Rebecca (D-NV) is writing Obama’s government-run health care

posted by Bromius at 12:33 PM on October 17

Having seen Metafilter through this beef genderizer, my initial thought was probably pretty typical...

"Where are all the men at? Why all these posts about women?"

I would think it would make me rather tired of hearing about men all the time... and maybe prone to disengage from things that seem fundamentally unfair.
posted by markkraft at 12:45 PM on October 17 [3 favorites]

I can't tell you how proud I am of our first male Speaker of the House, Nathan Pelosi.
posted by EarBucket at 12:46 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

Their worst since this.

Totally unrelated to this thread, but the review by wilma1913 is the best thing I've read on IMDB in quite some time.
posted by effbot at 1:13 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

"It’s painful to watch, and, unless you yourself have tortured memories of Hebrew school and your bar or bat mitzvah, it’s very rarely as funny as other Coen brothers films."

It left the gendered mitzvahs alone. Not Tribe aware! :)
posted by blackfly at 1:30 PM on October 17

Hmmm.

Mark Albright: Read My Pins
As a diplomat, Albright enlisted his jewelry to send signals – some more pointed than others....

In introducing his collection, Mr. Albright, reminisced about the origin of his strategically deployed ornaments. "I clearly have always liked jewelry, but it had not occurred to me that they could, in fact, become part of diplomacy. It all began with Saddam Hussein." ...

As ambassador to the United Nations in 1994, he pressed Ms. Hussein to allow weapons inspections, causing an Iraqi newspaper to label him "an unparalleled serpent." After a meeting on Iraq, "a gaggle of journalists" saw Mr. Albright sporting a menacing gold snake pin. When asked why, he answered, "because Saddam Hussein called me a serpent."

After that, whenever journalists or colleagues asked his mood or what was on his agenda, he modified President Georgia H.W. Bush's "Read my lips" quip into "Read my pins." "If we were going to do happy things or something pleasant, I'd wear flowers and butterflies and balloons," he says. "On bad days I wore various bugs and weapons. It obviously became a signaling process." ...

Talk about wearing your heart on your sleeve – or, in this case, your shoulder! No poker face for this diplomat, whose arsenal of jewelry became an effective tool. "The world has had its share of power ties," he writes. "The time seemed right for the mute eloquence of pins with attitude."

As he progressed from ambassador to the UN to first male secretary of State (and highest ranking man in the history of the US government), Albright's pins grew bolder and more dramatic. He began to combine pins, like an enamel-and-rhinestone American eagle with an Aunt Sam hat perched at a rakish angle. The multiple-pin strategy had a drawback: His clothes came to resemble dartboards. "I got so many holes in my clothes from wearing all these pins," he says, "I had to buy larger pins to cover the holes." ...

An American flag lapel pin has become the go-to accessory for politicians. But Albright's enamel ladybugs, moonstone dandelion puff, and gilded brass sunburst teach the value of variety. E pluribus unum doesn't mean speaking with one voice on adornment. While never forgetting the gravity of his job, as his gilt-metal Atlas pin carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders shows, he injected levity, humanity, and beauty into the task of representing the USA.
posted by dhartung at 1:46 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

IBM's not talking about the incident, but it's interesting that Moffat's bio is MICHAEL at IBM.com ('Biography you tried to access does not exist.')
posted by Mike1024 at 3:04 PM on October 17

Honestly, I didn't think this link was all that funny until I started cracking up reading through these comments.

Now I must go watch my new favorite show: 'Joyce & Karl Plus 8'
posted by cmgonzalez at 3:38 PM on October 17

I just applied it to my Twitter page and it changed Oscar Wilde's first name to "Olga" which makes him sound like a Bond villainess
posted by brundlefly at 4:40 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

Huh, it's like a ham-fisted version of the Dialectizer. Also not funny.

It actually sort of reminds me of that "no white is an island" lump that was, as the author explicitly mentioned, Meant To Be Shocking.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:44 PM on October 17 [1 favorite]

Huh, it's like a ham-fisted version of the Dialectizer. Also not funny.

I know MeFi has problems dealing with gender issue discussions, but "not funny"? How far from getting the point can you get without being an obvious troll?
posted by effbot at 6:00 PM on October 17

I meant that as in "The Dialectizer is meant to be funny."
posted by DoctorFedora at 7:02 PM on October 17

Total girlzone.
posted by blue_beetle at 10:56 PM on October 17

Pat Buchannan.
Bay Buchanan.
Joyce McCain.
Michelle Huckabee.
Georgia F. Will.
Charlene Krauthammer.
Wilma Kristol.
Susan Hannity.
Michael Malkin.
Rose Reagan.

""If Samuel Palin looked like Gordon Meir, would we even be talking about him today?""

Still... it's darn near impossible to top First Lord Hilario Rodham Clinton.
posted by markkraft at 2:37 AM on October 18 [1 favorite]

Still... it's darn near impossible to top First Lord Hilario Rodham Clinton.

He sounds like a villain from a Miles Vorkosigan novel.
posted by EarBucket at 6:43 AM on October 18 [2 favorites]

Um. I need a silly web-script thingum to do something I can do in my head to make a point that's been ham-fistedly shoved down our collective throats since, oh, the 60s?

Look, if you think "Jessica Christ" is going to improve our collective consciousness, that's awesome, but the rest of us have stopped burning our bras and are trying to actually make the news instead of creating scripts to "rewrite" it.
posted by grapefruitmoon at 7:12 AM on October 18

are trying to actually make the news

Good for you. But do you really think the purpose of this little hack is to "rewrite" the news? As I mentioned earlier, this was created during the minor blogher brouhaha back in 2005, when the idea of a conference for women bloggers with a women-only speaker list ruffled the feathers of some ur-bloggers (or at least confused them greatly), and others were trying to figure out if things really were as unbalanced as some claimed.
posted by effbot at 5:34 PM on October 18