What if Donald Trump were a woman

found via Ace

I have been kind of off Ace since he went full Trump but this is interesting:

It was an experiment in, ahem, "re-gendering" the debates. A male actor would play Hillary's role, but renamed "Jonathan Gordon." A female actor would play Trump's role, renamed "Brenda King."

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 People were surprised to find that assumptions to be wrong.

From the original write up at NYU.edu

Based on the conversations after the performances, it sounded like audience members had their beliefs rattled in a similar way. What were some themes that emerged from their responses?

We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened”—meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman—that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” 

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I remember turning to Maria at one point in the rehearsals and saying, "I kind of want to have a beer with her!" The majority of my extended family voted for Trump. In some ways, I developed empathy for people who voted for him by doing this project, which is not what I was expecting. I expected it to make me more angry at them, but it gave me an understanding of what they might have heard or experienced when he spoke.

Back to Ace:

It seems to me that Hillary's gender actually covered up her flaws, such as inauthenticity, scriptedness, recitations of pablum, and fake-smiling, while, when she was played by a male actor, those flaws were suddenly very visible to the people who think of themselves as "gender-woke" but maybe should just think of themselves as gender partisans.

Though I have to also admit: Another effect of the gender reversal is to make Donald Trump's aggressiveness and bluntness sound more reasonable and less grunt-bark.

I  think that is probably true, but I also think that the gender reversal helps reveal why those of us who have been anti-Hillary since she first appeared on the scene are so.  She has always struck me as less intelligent than everyone proclaimed her to be as well as just a slimy human being.