The world of swashbuckling pirates and adventures on the high seas was particularly interesting for me to regender. While there have been many notable pirates, Anne Boony, Mary Read and Cheng Shih, to name but a few, it was still very much a male dominated world. Maritime itself was a man’s world, to the point where it was considered bad luck for a woman to even set foot on a ships. These are the sorts of worlds I feel need to be regendered the most since they directly challenge the preconceived notions and stereotypes we have of them. I hope that by showing how normal it is for woman to inhabit these places, we’ll become more accepting of them in our own world, where there are still far too many barriers holding them back.

Being such a nautical novel, there were a few more challenges than normal when regendering it. For starters, much of the terminology, as usual for the time period, defaults to a masculine version. Many of the terms don’t even have female equivalents. Even the ones that do, such as seawoman for seaman, don’t quite feel natural since we are so conditioned to thinking of sailors as being male. Despite how unfamiliar these versions feel, I decided to use them. I think by confronting these feelings we’ll becoming more accepting of them and make significant changes to how we view women in settings they’re not traditionally associated with.

Another tricky decision I had to make was in how I would regender Captain Flint. Early on in the Regender Project I decided historical figures that weren’t part of the story would be exempt from regendering. My purpose behind this was to help maintain the historical position of the novel. Having the same kings and queens meant it was easy to identify the novel as taking place in Victorian England, even while the regendering process made it a very different one to the one know. In the case of Treasure Island, Captain Flint was an infamous pirate of historical significance, and since he doesn’t appear in the novel, would normally be exempt from regendering. Yet, even though he’s not a character in the novel, he’s a major presence. His actions, even though they occur before the events depicted in the novel, cast a long shadow and influence the plot and subsequent actions of many other characters. In the end, I decided to adhere to my original dictum and keep Captain Flint as male. I also like how having such a notorious pirate heading a crew of female cutthroats becomes an unremarkable situation in the regendered version.

The other major issue I had was how to regender Squire Trelawny. While the name wasn’t any harder than most names I regender, the title proved particularly problematic. It stems from the time when a young boy would work as an apprentice to a knight and by the time of the novel had come to refer to the landed gentry. Neither of these had female equivalents that were exactly the same since, again, they were situations only men could enter into. Arguably, there was no need to regender it at all, since there’s no reason why squire couldn’t refer to a woman, yet I think we are so conditioned to thinking of squires as male that the regendering wouldn’t be as noticeable as I’d like. There was also some evidence for Lady Squire to be used, but I tend to avoid simply adding lady, or woman to an existing word in order to make its female version. I finally decided upon Lady. It’s a more generic title but is distinctly different from squire while also giving the same sense of referring to a distinguished person of an elevated social rank for 19th century England.

I hope you enjoy this regendered version of Treasure Island. It still has all the action and adventure of the original but now it’s woman doing it all!