Transgendered Fairy Tales
by Kaleigh Way

Unless you read a lot of fairy tales, you might not be familiar with some of the stories that I've rewritten here. Rest assured: they are bona fide fairy tales (with a few folk tales) that I found and tweaked in a certain way. If you're interested in knowing where they come from, there is a page of sources at the very end.

I suppose it would be possible to take all the well-known stories, like Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and force one of the characters into a dress, but I don't have the heart to do such a thing. I've tried to find folk tales and fairy tales in which a gender change might do some good – or at least not seem too far out of place.

Honestly, it's strange that I have to do this work at all. Folk and fairy tales are full of transformations: people turn into monsters, animals, and even inanimate objects — and monsters, animals, and inanimate objects turn into people. In Cinderella all sorts of changes take place, and no one is surprised at all.

So why don't we see women turn into men and men turn into women?

It's not as though imaginative literature has any rules. Fairy tales often make little sense, or end in arbitrary ways. While princes and princesses disguise themselves as peasants or merchants or who-knows-what, why is it that no man thinks of wearing a dress, and no woman dreams of pulling on a pair of pants? It seems like the most natural thing in the world.

It's true, there is one story where this happens: in Andrew Lang's Violet Fairy Book, The Princess Who Pretended To Be A Boy. At the end, she actually turns into a boy, welcomes the change, and gets married to a girl. But it's the only transgendered fairy tale I know of.

And yes, there is a folk tale, The Cow On The Roof, in which a husband and wife switch jobs for a day, with predictably comic results. The story is all about curiosity over what life as the other sex is like. So why, in a land ruled by fantasy, don't they just go for a full-on gender swap?

It's downright odd, when you start to think about it, that there are so few stories about men masquerading as women or women masquerading as men. It seems like a fairly obvious story device that would provide a lot of irony, suspense, and humor. There's also the built-in fear of discovery and its consequences, which would add a lot of excitement to a story. So why doesn't it happen?

I've tried, with this little collection, to fit a few bricks into the gap.

These stories are short, and were a lot of fun to write. I hope that you'll find them fun to read. You might think that writing stories about boys who turn into girls would get monotonous, but for me, it never gets old.

And they all live happily ever after!

© 2007 by Kaleigh Way