R E P A P E Я
P R E S S
Gender-Shuffle
Classic Children's Books
1. Choose a Book
We're currently offering classics from the public domain.
2. Choose the Genders
Make the characters male, female, or gender-neutral.
3. Read the Ebook
Generate a custom ebook in which the characters have the genders you've chosen.
Repaper Press
Values & Mission
Short-Circuit Implicit Bias
Despite our best efforts, we've all grown up steeped in pop culture that perpetuates—often unintentionally—limiting stereotypes.
Some stereotypes are so pervasive and normalized it's hard for us to identify them, either when we witness them or when we ourselves unconsciously default to them—writing or reading fiction, or in real life.
When the only variable that changes is the pronouns ("he", "she", "they") we can isolate how we personally respond differently to different genders, often discovering limiting assumptions we've been carting around unawares.
Juxtaposing the narrative with a different gender can also reveal startling contrasts in how we have written—and continue to write—different genders.
Shortcut to Better Representation
It's important to explore prejudice through fiction, but it's also important to imagine realities in which everyone's humanity comes before any other aspect of their identity—realities in which equality is the unremarkable default.
Many authors are creatively writing the change they wish to see in the world, giving us complex new characters, and new worlds beyond the historic prejudices we're struggling to outgrow.
But those prejudices have had a significant headstart: centuries' worth of fiction. And the classics cast particularly long shadows.
Rather than trying to outrun the shadow of our literary past, we can recruit it, simply by making the genders in existing stories interchangeable.