The Gender-Swapped Bible: A Text Manipulation Experiment

Rhi and I were watching TikTok or some other doom scroll machine and came across a video that talked about how weird it would be if a 2000 year old book about a woman and her 12 friends dictated how a (quite substantial) segment of the American population treated Men. Around this time I wanted to try a text manipulation project and this seemed like an interesting medium.

The idea: mechanically swap every gendered word.

The Approach

I was using Python to do bulk manipulation on the text, and not using NLP. So I had to organize it so the text went through a series of passes through different changes. It's nine Python scripts running in sequence, each handling a specific category of swaps.

Pass 1-2: Names

The first pass swaps 223 major biblical names using a hand-curated dictionary. I generated "real" names of different gendered association for this.

Adam → Adrienne
Eve → Evan
Jesus → Jessica
Moses → Monica
David → Diana
Mary → Malcolm

The second pass auto-generates swaps for minor names using suffix rules. Names ending in -iah become -as, names ending in -el get -la appended, and so on.

Pass 3: Nouns

This started to be tricky as you can't just do two find-and-replaces for "king → queen" and "queen → king"—the second one undoes the first and makes all kings/queens to kings.

The solution I came up with was to use temporary markers. Replace "king" with "§§§queen§§§", then replace "queen" with "king", then strip the markers. Same approach for dozens of word pairs:

king ↔ queen
father ↔ mother
son ↔ daughter
husband ↔ wife
man ↔ woman
lord ↔ lady
priest ↔ priestess

Compound words get processed first so "kingdom" becomes "queendom" before "king" gets touched.

Pass 4-5: Pronouns

Standard swaps with capitalization preserved:

he ↔ she
him ↔ her
his ↔ hers

The capitalization was kept. "He" (referring to God) becomes "She" while "he" (referring to some guy) becomes "she".

Pass 6-7: Biological Terms

Some things don't have clean opposites and would maybe need more context in swaps. "Circumcision" doesn't swap to anything obvious, so it becomes "marking". "Womb" becomes "being". "Nursing" becomes "feeding". Some of these are more neutralized rather than flipped.

Pass 8-9: Grammar Cleanup

English grammar creates edge cases. "her blessing" if we're swapping female-to-male—it should be "his blessing" in certain contexts and not "him blessing". These passes fix object pronouns after prepositions and verbs, but I am sure not perfectly.

Passages

Genesis 1:27:

So God created woman in her own image, in the image of God created she her; female and male created she them.

Genesis 2:22-23 (the rib story, reversed):

And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from woman, made she a man, and brought him unto the woman. And Adrienne said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: he shall be called Man, because he was taken out of Woman.

John 3:16:

For God so loved the world, that she gave her only begotten Daughter, that whosoever believeth in her should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Proverbs 31 (the "virtuous woman" passage):

Who can find a virtuous man? for him price is far above rubies. The heart of him wife doth safely trust in him...

The Ten Commandments:

Honour thy mother and thy father... Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour's husband...

Edge Cases

Double-swap prevention: The temp marker system (§§§) prevents "king" and "queen" from colliding mid-process.

Word boundaries: Regex \b markers ensure "human" doesn't become "huwoman" and "woman" doesn't become "wowo".

Compound words first: "Kingdom" is processed before "king" so you get "queendom" instead of "queenking".

Names that shouldn't change: "Israel" stays "Israel"—it's a place and a people, not just a person.

The his/him problem: In KJV English, "his" sometimes means "him" in object position. Pass 8-9 tries to fix these based on preceding words (prepositions and verbs).

Output

The full text is available as a plain text file and as an epub in the GitHub repo. I called it the "Queen Jamie Version".

What's the Point?

Partially, this was a simple text manipulation tech project that at this scale has interesting challenges—the double-swap problem, the grammar edge cases, the name collision issues.

That said, I do find it an interesting perspective. Some people are not that onboard with changing scripture in this way, while others have thought it an interesting project that might even make the message of the bible more approachable. What is clear is that reading familiar verses with flipped pronouns can be odd, and trying to identify what materially is causing either discomfort or comfort with a new reading is worthwhile. And not because the theology changes—most verses work fine either way. The disorientation likely comes from noticing how much one internalizes the original gendering without thinking too much about it.