Does a Character’s Sex Inherently Matter to the Story?

Recently there has been a lot of discussion around the new all-female led Ghostbusters movie. One of the comments that I have seen from a few people is that they have a problem with switching the characters from male to female because it was not originally intended to be female characters. The problem I have with this mindset is that it seem to say that the sex of a character inherently matters to the story, but this is not always the case. I think there are times where the sex does matter, but a lot of the time whether the character is male or female is not in and of itself important to the story. Some of the problem with this mindset, in my opinion, is that it kind of says there are certain characteristics, roles, and actions that can only be played out by one sex or another. Now, again, this is sometimes true, but for the most part I really don’t think it matters.

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