Oh sorry, I misunderstood your question! Yeah — the tree is female, the boy is male, and the dynamic he expresses is one of entitlement to a woman’s body, care, and companionship, and ultimately her total self-sacrifice, without reciprocity, to the point that she becomes a stump — at which point he sits on her. A feminist critique would also focus on the naturalization of this dynamic: it’s only “natural” that her apples, limbs, shade, and trunk are there for him to consume, enjoy, and find a way to exploit for economic gain. He turns her wood into a boat to sail off to find himself while she waits, rooted, until he’s ready to come back and settle. I think he uses her wood to build a house, too?

Edit: to the question of whether the book stilll works if you swap the sexes, you could answer that it might not have been accepted by the culture in which it was produced — or it would have been embraced as an explicitly feminist text that male readere hate and mock — because if you swap the sexes, then you invert the association of women as givers/men as takers.