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Gender Flip - TV Tropes

  • ️Sat Jul 28 2007

Gender Flip (trope)

"What do I think of it being played by a woman, when it was played by a man in 1972, as part of a Scottish pagan community, and now it's played by a woman with the same name? What do I think of it? Nothing. There's nothing to say."

Here's a quick spin on an old story: flip the male roles to the women and the female roles to the men. If you are in a hurry, you only need to change the casting, a few honorifics, pronouns, and maybe a first name or two. If you are able to give it a little more thought, though, you can take this opportunity to explore how there might be a difference in the way things play out with the genders reversed. It's a very old technique of retelling a story; many folk Fairy Tales have Gender Flip variants.

Sometimes the remake or reimagining of a work may involve Gender Flips due to societal changes on the Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality that, for example, would allow a formerly male Number Two to be an Action Girl instead. Occasionally, the Gender Flip occurs with a work that's already in development, or even in production (due to, for example, an actor's sudden unavailability or simply a last-minute casting idea). The results can be particularly interesting in these cases, as the written role may be almost completely unchanged from its original opposite-gender version.

Fanfics that use this trope are fairly common. Rule 63 is closely related, but executed differently. A good general rule of thumb is that a Rule 63 character looks like exactly the same character, as if subjected to Gender Bender. Gender Flip characters will often differ from their originals in a great many ways other than the character's sex.

Supertrope of She's a Man in Japan, which is specifically about localizations changing a character's gender. Distinguished from Crosscast Role, in which the actor is the opposite sex of the character. For example, a production of Hamlet that (as in Shakespeare's own day) had Ophelia played by a boy would be a Crosscast Role, but a production with a male actor playing a male character named "Ophelius" and referred to in the text with male pronouns would be a Gender Flip.

Not to be confused with Gender Bender, though the terms are sometimes used interchangeably.note  If an Alternate Universe flips everyone's sexes, that's Gender-Bent Alternate Universe. When a song gets this treatment in a Cover Version, that's The Cover Changes the Gender.

Also note that this trope is not about "gender roles" in the generic sense. Those are covered (for examples involving couples, anyway) by Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy. See also Distaff Counterpart and Historical Gender Flip. See also Race Lift when it's the ethnicity that changes.

Examples:

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Advertising 

  • In the 1990s UK adverts for Coco Pops, Coco's gang included a male giraffe named Shorty and a female hippo named Hefty. The 2010 adverts feature a female giraffe and a male hippo (names unrevealed).
  • The 80s rebranding of Freakies cereal turned the male Snorkledorf into the female Tooter and the female Goody-Goody into the male Hotdog. The two of them would be returned to their original genders and names for subsequent merchandise and lore, which chose to ignore the 80s canon in favor of the original.
  • In The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, Aristaeus is a man in mythology, but is a woman in the film, and her affections are shifted from Eurydice to Orpheus.
  • It's not entirely clear if it's this or Larynx Dissonance, but in the Wildlife Trusts' short film based on The Wind in the Willows, Ratty is voiced by Catherine Tate, and unlike Alison Steadman as Mole, she doesn't seem to be doing a voice that might be intended to sound male.

Asian Animation 

  • In the SEER cartoon, Dean is referred to as a male, whereas they were referred to as a female in the original game.
  • Yamucha's-Kung Fu Academy: Masa was female in the original Yamucha's shorts before being changed to an androgynous-looking male for the show.

Audio Plays 

  • Terry Nation's failed pilot for his Dalek TV series, "The Destroyers", had brother and sister team David and Sara Kingdom (a Transplant - she had been a Doctor Who companion, although the show was not intended to take place in Doctor Who continuity), with David taking the Action Hero and protagonist role, and Sara spending most of the story captured and getting kidnapped by Daleks. When Big Finish adapted it as an audio drama for their The Lost Stories range, the adaptation mostly worked off the original script but switched the roles of David and Sara to make her the main character.
  • In the audio drama version of Stephen King's The Mist, the Hatlen character, named Mike in the original novella, is renamed Stella Hatlen. She shares her male book counterpart's fate of getting killed by spiders in the pharmacy.
  • Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's Naomi/A Fool's Love has received a BLCD adaptation, which changes the heroine into a man but still retains the name Naomi (albeit changing it into kanji and giving him his husband's surname).

Card Games 

  • Aither, in the original Greek mythology, is male. In the Yu-Gi-Oh! OCG, Aither is female. This makes sense, if they want a contrast between the ruler of Heaven and the ruler of the Underworld.

Comic Books 

  • In The Multiverse of The DCU, Earth-11 is an Alternate Universe where all the genders are flipped. Thus you have Superwoman and Superlad, Batwoman, Alexis Luthor, Wonder Man (or Wonder Warrior, depending on your sources), and so on.
  • The Multiversity:
    • One of the major characters is Aquawoman, the Aquaman analog of Earth-11. Earth-11 is later explored in further detail in Teen Justice, an iteration of the Teen Titans starring Robin (a female version of Damian Wayne named Talia Kane), Supergirl (a female version of Jon Kent named Laurel Lane), Troy (a male version of Donna Troy named Donald Troy), Aquagirl (a female version of Jackson Hyde named Jacqui Hyde), Klarienne the Witch-Girl (a female version of Klarion the Witch Boy), a male version of Raven, and Kid Quick (a gender fluid version of Kid Flash named Jess Chambers).
    • Blitzen, The Flash of Earth-10 from The Multiversity: Mastermen #1, is female.
  • In Dark Nights: Metal, the Dark Multiverse's Earth -11, home of the Drowned (Bryce Wayne), is also a Gender Flip world, with the Aquaman analog being Aquawoman and Selina Kyle being Sylvester Kyle.
  • The Ame-Comi Girls series takes place in such a world. Jesse Chambers is The Flash, Natasha Irons is Steel, Carrie Kelly is Robin, Jade Yifei is Earth's Green Lantern, and Duela Dent is a stand-in for The Joker.
  • Similarly, some Exiles stories had the team visit worlds with gender-flipped versions of Marvel heroes. The most prominent example would be the team's version of Sunfire, who had the civilian identity of Mariko Yashida rather than Shiro Yoshida.
  • Sir Ystin (a cross-time counterpart of the original Shining Knight, Sir Justin) in Grant Morrison's Shining Knight, turns out to actually be the female Ystina in disguise as a boy. The New 52 incarnation of Ystin in Demon Knights is non-binary.
  • Many male Marvel Comics characters become females in the Marvel Mangaverse:
    • The Punisher is a Japanese woman.
    • The Human Torch from the Fantastic Four becomes a teenage girl, with her name changed from Johnny Storm to Jonatha Storm. She's also a rather blatant Expy of Asuka from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
    • Iron Man became Antoinette "Toni" Stark, though it was later revealed she's the younger sister of the "real" Tony Stark.
    • The X-Men villain Pyro is changed from an Australian man to a British woman.
  • There's also one universe where Iron Man is a woman named Natasha Stark, who ended up falling in love with and marrying Captain America. Think of that what you will.
  • The What If? story Catwoman: Guardian of Gotham is essentially a gender-flipped version of the Batman mythos, with Catwoman as a superhero and Batman as her nemesis. Additionally, gender-flipped versions of Alfred and Two-Face appear in supporting roles.
  • The Spirit's sidekick Ebony White is a girl in the First Wave universe. This is because writer Brian Azzarello felt Ebony was more fitting as a female name in the 21st century.
  • Edward Prendick becomes Ellen Prendick in IDW Publishing's adaptation of The Island of Doctor Moreau.
  • In the Ultimate Marvel Universe:
  • Secret Wars (2015):
  • Earth 2:
    • Red Tornado is a Gynoid.
    • The Earth 2 version of Aquaman is, well, Aquawoman.
    • Lee Travis, the Crimson Avenger pre-New 52, is now a female reporter and given a Race Lift.
  • Marvel Adventures: In Marvel's all-ages imprint, Giant-Man is replaced by Giant-Girl, a teenage version of Janet Van Dyne. However Hank Pym does later appear as Ant-Man.
  • Overlapping with Canon Character All Along, the comic book sequel to Mega Man: Fully Charged reveals that Mega Man's adoptive sister Suna is that continuity's version of Zero.
  • The proposed 2015 reboot of the Archie Comics hero The Web changed the character from an adult man named John Raymond to a 14-year-old Korean-American schoolgirl named Jane Raymond.
  • Camelot 3000: Tristan is a rare simultaneous example of Gender Flip and Gender Bender. The "role" of Sir Tristan is recast (via reincarnation) for a female... but Lady Tristan remembers her life as a man.
  • Marvel Fairy Tales: One issue of Spider-Man Fairy Tales was yet another gender-flipped Cinderella. Peter was Cinders, with Norman and Harry Osborn as the evil stepfather and stepbrother. Gwen was the princess, and MJ a servant at the Osborn household who helped Peter (possibly a gender-flipped version of the Panto character Buttons.)
  • Spider-Verse:
    • Edge of Spider-Verse has the SP//dr mech, which is piloted by Peni Parker, a Japanese-American schoolgirl who is her universe's version of Peter Parker. The later Edge of Spider-Geddon mini-series also introduces a girl named Addy Brock, the pilot of the VEN#m mech.
    • Also introduced in Spider-Verse is Penelope Parker, an elementary schooler who gained powers after being bitten by a radioactive spider during a field trip. Additionally, her teacher is a female version of Kraven the Hunter named Ms. Kraven.
    • Subsequent Spider-Verse stories, such as Edge of Spider-Verse (2022) introduce even more gender flips and Distaff Counterparts, including Zarina Zahari (Spider-UK), Charlie Webber (Sun-Spider) and Hida Haruka (Sakura Spider). There's also the Disney Princess-inspired Princess Petra, a.k.a. Spinstress, whose love interest is a male Mary Jane Watson known as "Merry" James Watson, and whose enemy is a female version of Mysterio known as the Mysterious Empress. Even her Fairy Godmother is "Norma the Fairy Gob-Mother".
  • In the Animatter Universe (the Mirror Universe the Crime Syndicate hails from) seen in the Justice League comics, one of the members of the Justice Underground (the heroic version of the Legion of Doom) is Lady Sonar, a female version of the obscure Green Lantern villain Sonar.
  • Examples from G.I. Joe properties:
  • The DC Universe has several examples of male-to-female "recasting" via the Affirmative-Action Legacy method:
    • Zatanna (for her father, Zatara)
    • Jesse Quick (for her father, Johnny Quick, though Jesse has also taken on her mother's costumed identity as Liberty Belle.)
    • Beth Chapel, a protegeé of the original Dr. Mid-Nite, took on his role (with a slightly different spelling) as Dr. Midnight.
    • Dr. Fate's role was assumed by females (Linda Strauss and Inza Nelson) twice.
    • Yolanda Montez had a brief tenure as Wildcat before being killed by Eclipso.
    • Eclipso itself was recast as a female villain, after typically taking male hosts, during the run toward DC's Infinite Crisis event, taking Jean Loring as a host.
    • The new Judomaster is a woman, Sonia Sato.
    • During World War II, Danette Reilly took over the Firebrand identity from her brother Rod.
    • After retiring as Starman, Jack Knight passed his legacy and his Cosmic Rod onto the Star-Spangled Kid, Courtney Whitmore, who then changed her name to Stargirl.
    • Renee Montoya took up the mantle of The Question.
    • Metamorpho has now been replaced by Element Woman. As she is also of Korean descent, she counts as a Twofer.
  • Some versions of The Green Hornet have used a female Kato:
    • The current Dynamite series features Mulan Kato, daughter of the original Kato.
    • The NOW Comics version had Mishi Kato (half-sister to the original), who eventually became Hornet's Distaff Counterpart, the Crimson Wasp.
  • The Authority briefly dabbled with this by introducing an alternate universe in which all sexes were reversed. At one point Midnighter recruits an entire army of reversed-sex superheroes, although they are instantly killed on the next page.
  • In Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Aunt May had a female dog named Ms. Lion. Ms. Lion later appeared in Pet Avengers as a male dog, but with the same name.
  • Batman:
  • Taskmaster is a woman in Deadpool MAX. Rule of Cool.
  • In Timestorm 2009-2099, which features an alternate version of the Marvel 2099 timeline, Bloodhawk of the X-Men 2099 is female.
  • Done In-Universe in Angel (IDW). There was a Hollywood movie (Very Loosely Based on a True Story) about The Fall, which had Spike as a woman◊ in a romance with Angel. note  When they watched it, Angel was disgusted and insulted, while Spike thought it was hilarious.
  • Billy Lane from season 9 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is introduced as a normal teenage boy who takes on the Slayer role when his town is infested with zombified vampires in the aptly-named Billy the Vampire Slayer. At the very end of the season, he gains a spiritual connection to the Slayer line (making him the very first male Slayer), but nothing ever comes of it and is only used to drive the main plot of the tenth season.
  • Due to the gender roles of The '30s, Spider-Man Noir has a male Federal Agent Jean De Wolfe standing in for the female Captain Jean DeWolff in mainstream continuity.
  • When Mick Anglo Expied the Shazam! cast to make Marvelman, Captain Marvel became Marvelman, Captain Marvel Jr. became Kid Marvelman... and Mary Marvel became Young Marvelman.
  • In DC Comics' New 52 version of The Green Team, Cecil Sunbeam, kid movie director, becomes Cecilia Sunbeam, starlet.
  • Dare, in the Amalgam Universe title Assassins, was an amalgam of Daredevil and Deathstroke, both male characters, but was female.
  • In the Bronze Age Superman story "The Turnabout Trap", Mister Mxyzptlk decided to make Superman's life miserable by gender-inverting the people in Superman's world so that his girlfriend Lois Lane doesn't exist, as she has been changed into Louis Lane. Superman realizes who is behind it as he sees among the pictures of Superwoman's enemies that Mxyzptlk didn't gender-invert himself (and made Superwoman and Clara Kent separate people, since Mxy wasn't aware Superman had a secret identity). At the end of the story, when Superman gets Mxyzptlk to undo his magic, he meets the real Louis Lane, who turns out to be Lois' cousin. This story likely served as the inspiration for Earth-11.
  • The Star Trek: Ongoing series by IDW, a continuation of the film series, saw the publication of the first part of a two-part series, in which the entire crew of the Enterprise has been gender-swapped. There are a lot of women. It gets hilarious in the end when they cross over into the normal universe and meet their counterparts.
  • In the New 52 version of The Forever People, Serifan has become Serafina. (She's also had a Race Lift, since she's now Vykin's sister.)
  • In Just Imagine... Stan Lee Creating the DC Universe:
    • The Flash is a teenage girl named Mary Maxwell.
    • Lucinda Ramada is the first interpretation of the Parasite to be a woman, predating Alexandra Allston by two years.
  • Although Batman '66 is supposed to be based directly on the Batman (1966) TV series, Warden Chrichton (played by white male actor David Lewis in the show) became an African-American woman.
  • Earth One:
  • In ODY-C, a space opera set in the aftermath of a male Gendercide, nearly all the male characters from The Odyssey have been gender flipped. So have some of the female characters, because this is a sci-fi setting where "male" and "female" are not the only options.
  • Spider-Gwen:
    • The title character is a cross between this and a Composite Character, being a version of Gwen Stacy who received the fateful radioactive spider bite that empowered Peter Parker in the mainline universe.
    • This version of Captain America is an African-American woman named Samantha Wilson.
    • In another Distaff/Composite mix, this universe's Peggy Carter is the one-eyed, long-lived director of S.H.I.E.L.D., effectively making her a female version of Nick Fury in all but name.
    • Jessica Drew is a male agent named Jesse Drew.
    • The Venom symbiote was created by a scientist named Elsa Brock, a play on Venom's traditional alter ego of Eddie Brock.
  • Prez, the story of boy president Prez Rickard, was rebooted as Prez, the story of girl president Beth Ross. The original "Prez" has a supporting role as her Vice-President.
  • Gotham Academy: Second Semester reintroduces the Terrible Trio as Academy students. Armand Lydecker, the Fox, becomes Amanda Lydecker and Warren Lawford, the Shark, becomes Wendy Lawford. It's also mentioned that Amanda is descended from a 19th century Ambroos Lydecker who also called himself the Fox, so it's possible the original Trio are still in continuity as part of the Ancient Conspiracy.
  • Laufey from The Mighty Thor is an odd example. In the mythology, Loki is often referred to as "Loki Laufeyson", the same way that Thor is called "Odinson"; ergo, Marvel created their own version of Laufrey as Loki's father. The thing is, in the original myths, Laufrey was actually Loki's mother, while his father was named Fárbauti. Presumably the Thor writers just didn't realize that. (Incidentally, scholars aren't sure why Loki uses a matronymic; since the myths were originally written as poems, it's quite possibly just for alliteration.)
  • Superboy: Kon-El meets a number of alternate earth Superboys during the "Hyper-tension!" arc, one of whom is a female version of himself, with the same backstory, personality and fashion sense but cloned from Kara Zor-El instead of Kal-El because her earth's version of Kal was killed as an infant.
  • Super Sons Annual #1 reintroduces Streaky the Super-Cat. In this version Streaky is female (and apparently in love with Krypto) although he was a tomcat on Earth-One and in the Krypto the Superdog cartoon.
  • The Immortal Hulk features a female Race Lifted version of Jack (Jackie) McGee from The Incredible Hulk (1977) TV series.
  • At some point during one of the innumerable Soft Reboots of Dennis the Menace (UK), Dennis's pet pig Rasher changed from a boar to a sow.
  • In the New 52 Green Arrow book, a female version of Silver Age GA villain the Red Dart (originally a man named Jonathan Mallory) was introduced as a member of Richard Dragon's Longbow Hunters. This version later appeared in Arrow.
  • Legion of Super-Heroes (2020) changes R.J. Brande into a woman.
  • Milo Manara created a Hotter and Sexier comic adaptation of Gulliver's Travels starring a woman that was titled Gullivera.
  • In Supreme Power, Amphibian, who was a man in Squadron Supreme, is female.
  • The Greek god of the west wind, Zephyrus, is apparently female in pre-Crisis Shazam! comics, where Mary's magic word is explicitly said to refer to female mythological figures rather than the male ones who empower Billy and Freddy, but one of her powers is "the fleetness of Zephyrus".
  • IDW Publishing's GoBots miniseries depicts Vamp and Spay-C as male when the characters were female GoBots in Challenge of the GoBots.
  • In The Witches graphic novel the other child who is transformed into a mouse is a girl who is a lot more helpful to the protagonist, in the original book and it's adaptations it was an overweight boy named Bruno.
  • Wonder Woman (1942): After Marston died and Kanigher took over the book Kanigher quickly started replacing female supporting characters with male characters with no explanation, even though it was supposedly the same continuity. Characters replaced included Deisra of Venus, Queen Moonbeam and Queen Celerita, whom Kanigher replaced with Vertigo of Venus, King Moono and King Celerito.
  • The Human Popsicle Expy of Mike Hammer in the comic book Mickey Spillane's Mike Danger worked with a Lt. Patrick Chandler in the 1950s, but his descendant Patricia after he was thawed out in the future.

Comic Strips 

  • Madam & Eve does it in this strip◊ to commemorate National Women's Day.

    Madam: "What should we celebrate?"
    Eve: "That we're not men?"

Eastern European Animation 

Fairy Tales 

Fan Works 

  • In A Better Word Than Humanity, a Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fanfiction, the main villain is a gender-flipped version of an obscure character from the obscure tabletop game, of all things.
  • Always Visible: A psychic nanny named Josephine Thueson in Always Visible turns into the male culturologist Jordan Thurlow, Delia's neighbor.
  • In Aquaman: Monster, Topo, a male octopus in the comics, is female here.
  • The Devil Fruit Hero: Kirby, usually a male in their home universe, is shown as a girl in this story.
  • "The Girl Who Lived" is a popular idea for stories in Harry Potter fandom:
    • A Butterfly Effect is one of many, replacing Harry James Potter with Harriet Lily Potter.
    • A Long Journey Home has Jasmine Potter.
    • Harry Potter And The Mysterious Curse Of The Girl Who Lived plays with this idea, keeping Harry a boy but placing him under a strange curse that makes everyone magical see him as a girl. With very few exceptions (Dumbledore, Ollivander and Luna), the curse stops them from considering for even a moment that "Harriet" might not be a girl, no matter how many times Harry tries to tell them.
    • The Rigel Black Chronicles draws heavily on elements of the Song of the Lioness, with Harriett Potter swapping identities with her cousin Arcturus Black so she can attend pureblood-only Hogwarts. Interestingly, Archie mostly doesn't have to hide his gender at the American Institute of Magic, he just calls himself "Harry" and claims that the records saying "Harriett" were a prank. (Until Hermione, who also came to AIM, does some digging...)
    • Weasley Girl keeps Harry a boy but gives the Gender Flip treatment to Ron Weasley instead, turning him into Veronica "Ronnie" Weasley.
    • Harry Potter and the Distaff Side drops the "real" Harry Potter into an alternate dimension where everyone has been gender-flipped, including himself.
    • Holly Potter and the Witching World has the premise that 90% of all magical births are female — meaning that most of the male characters (with a few notable exceptions) have been gender-flipped, but none of the female characters have.
    • Slytherin student Blaise Zabini was an accidental subject of this trope for many years. Prior to Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, his name was mentioned only once at the end of the sorting ceremony, with no other description given (though Word of God confirmed him as male in 2004 in response to a translator's inquiry). Because "Blaise" is a unisex name and there were few canon female Slytherins, many fanfic writers imagined the character as female. Once Half-Blood Prince confirmed canon Blaise as male, some writers made the character purposely female or transgender instead.
  • Hours 'Verse: On the Other Side, Yu's reincarnation Souji still lives with his mother's sibling and his six-year old cousin. This time, however, he lives with his maternal aunt and her son Noriaki Tanimoto.
  • Under the Sea (2023): Unlike in The Little Mermaid, the Prince's dog Max is a female named Raven.
  • On a Cross and Arrow features the Mane 6 ending up in an alternate world where everyone is gender-flipped, and thus they encounter their male counterparts. This fic proved to be so popular that the six stallion versions of the Mane 6 became their go-to names for gender-flips within the fandom (Dusk Shine for Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Blitz for Rainbow Dash, Bubble Berry for Pinkie Pie, Butterscotch for Fluttershy, and Elusive for Rarity, while Applejack is the same regardless).
  • Nerima Magistra Nelly Magi is Negima! Magister Negi Magi with every character gender-flipped.
  • NUMB3RS: Connecting has the gender flipped version of Megan Reeves and Larry Fleinhardt as Kevin Reeves and Laurie Fleinhardt.
  • Yuto Kiba becomes Yumi Kiba in Of Heroes and Devils.
  • In Izuku Midoriya, the Hero Devil, instead of male Yuuto Kiba, this story has female Yumi Kiba. Likewise, Dani Fenton is based on a gender-swapped version of Danny Phantom rather than his female clone.
  • Of Woman Born
    • The premise of the story is rather than a man, Dio Brando was born a girl named Diana Brando.
    • When the story enters the 20th century, it's revealed that Joseph Joestar is now an American girl named Josephine Joestar. It's also mentioned that Caesar Zeppeli is a girl named Calpurnia as well.
  • Once More with Feeling: In canon, Asuka called Shinji, Touji and Kensuke "The Three Stooges". In this story, Asuka, Hikari and Rei are called -very privately and very, very quietly by the abovementioned trio- "The Three Stoogettes".
  • The One I Love Is...: In this story Kaworu Nagisa -a character is male in canon- is a girl (and gets a rename: Kaoru Nagisa).
  • Special mention goes to The Vampire Diaries story Let It Rain which is a Gender Re-Flip of Jeremy was a girl in the books just with a different name and aged up.
  • Canon in G does this to Key/Visual Arts' Seasonverse, more specifically, Kanon.
  • This comes up frequently in Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan. For many of the verses pertaining to romantic relationships and complications thereof, the gender roles in the Total Drama incidents are reversed from the original roles in the operettas. This is especially prominent with respect to Cody's unsuccessful suit for Gwen's affections.
  • The Supernatural fanfic All That Jazz is a variation. It adapts Chicago with characters from Supernatural, most of which are the opposite gender of their counterparts from the play.
  • Pivix user Yuu Kurono has made a number of character sketches and comics around the premise of gender-flipping a portion of the cast of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (specifically Madoka, Kyoko, and Mami... And a token shota Human!Charlotte <long before Charlotte's Pre-Witch form was even conceived by the staff, let alone revealed>), along with Humanoid!Kyubey. They can all be found on Danbooru (try the tags "kurono_yuu" and "genderswap" to get started), but due to the nature of the site, it would be better to offer a link to a surprisingly good fandub of most of the comics on YouTube. The romantic undertones of Homura/Madoka and Sayaka/Kyoko suddenly become very blatant.
  • The Star Trek (2009) story Written in the Stars featured a gender-swapped Kirk; Jane Tiberia, both in the Prime reality and the Alternate reality. She and Spock hook up.
  • In Mechanical Maniacs, the Mega Man 3 Robot Masters are Author Avatars. After the first series of epilogues, Anton, the Needleman of the team, departed. For series 2, Gauntlet (Shadow Man)'s sister Psycho Magnet joined to fill the Needleman role, so the character became "Needlegal". During Series 5, Musashi Razz became inactive as Sparkman, so Classi Cal took over the role and it became "Spark Chan". And those are just the members that are still around — around the same time Needleman became Needlegal, Sarah also took up the then-vacant Hardman role as "Hard Chick", until Series 2 ended.
  • In the Persona 4 fanfiction, Façade (Persona 4), the protagonist Yu Narukami is gender-swapped. Not much really changes, except for one thing: No-one knows Yu is female.
  • Some Kirby fanfics tend to portray Galacta Knight as female, usually with the intent of having 'her' paired with Meta Knight.
  • In The Bridge, the canonically male Mothra Leo is changed to the female Mothra Lea. The author pointed out that since the Mothra species reproduces asexually, they should logically all be female.
  • In the pre-Crisis Earth-S fanfic Whatever Happened to Isis?, Isis's Love Interest Rick Mason is given an Adventure Archaeologist sister named Regina, who is transformed by the Orb of Ra into a Shapeshifter; a gender flip of Earth-1's Rex Mason aka Metamorpho.
  • Many fanfics for The Hobbit replace Bilbo with a hobbit woman, often with the intent to pair her off with Thorin. Some keep Bilbo's backstory, while others give him a sister, and there are also those where Bilbo didn't want to go on the quest and his relative Lobelia went instead. Then there is The Monstrous Company of Thorin Oakenshield whose title is rather unsubtly based on Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment. Accordingly, the whole company with the exception of Bilbo and Gandalf turn out to be female.
  • Happens way too often to keep track of in Five Nights at Freddy's fan works, usually due to either Viewer Gender Confusion or flat-out Shipping. In fact, it's so common, that there are meme templates all over the Internet (mostly DeviantArt) of what gender the animatronic characters are in the user's Alternate Universe.
    • Officially speaking, all versions of Bonnie the Bunny are male. That doesn't stop people from portraying them as female, especially when it comes to Toy Bonnie (who is often referred to as "Bon Bon" when his gender is flipped).
    • The first game's version of Chica the Chicken is occasionally written as male since she doesn't really look feminine and isn't referred to by name until Custom Night.
    • Mangle has an Ambiguous Gender due to conflicting evidence from the second game. They're supposed to be a remade version of Foxy the Pirate Fox, who is male, and the game's instructor calls Mangle a male. However, Mangle's casing is white with pink highlights and they appear in a challenge called "Ladies Night", leaving the fandom split on the issue entirely. Whatever gender Mangle is, they've definitely gotten this treatment in fan works and are likely the reason the aforementioned "gender memes" even exist.
    • The Puppet gets this treatment as well, in not one, but two ways. Like Mangle, it has an Ambiguous Gender (but is generally agreed to be male) and it also resembles a clown. However, the animatronics in the series are canonically possessed by dead children, whose genders are also unknown save for the Puppet's, which was often believed to be male before turning out to be female.
  • Monkey D. Luffy in Sol Invictus becomes this along with some minor characters. She mostly still acts like her male counterpart.
  • In Spider-Man: Finding Home, Peter Parker- attending college post-Spider-Man: No Way Home- is shocked when one of his professors is a one-armed woman who introduces herself as Doctor Catherine Connors, quickly guessing that she is the counterpart of Doctor Curt Connors, AKA the Lizard.
  • In a fairly minor example, the Farscape fic Left Behind makes the Leviathan Rohvu male rather than female; however, this change can be easily explained as the crew of Moya just assuming that Rohvu was female and nobody corrected them because they either didn't care or weren't in a fit state to do so.
  • Earth-27:
    • Red Lantern Rankorr becomes a woman named Jane Moore.
    • Psycho-Pirate becomes a woman named Regina Hayden.
    • Blue Devil is changed from Daniel Cassidy to Danielle Cassidy.
  • In Amazing Fantasy, the Prowler is a woman when he's normally the very male Hobie Brown in the comics.
  • The Green Spider: The Tinkerer and The Chameleon are traditionally male, but both are changed to female here.
  • I Ain't a Doll, This Ain't a Dollhouse: The premise is that the story is an adaptation of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Eyes of Heaven with Jonathan Joestar both having a larger role in the narrative and as a woman named Johanna Joestar. Additionally, Jonathan's Love Interest Erina Pendleton is now a man named Erin.
    • A comment from Diego Brando in chapter 6 reveals that Jonathan's Alternate Self, Johnny Joestar, is also a woman named Joni Joestar, though as of chapter 7 she hasn't made an appearance yet.
  • So the Trauma is based off Kim Possible: So The Drama but with one crucial change: Eric is now Erica. Shego saw Drakken's plans for Eric and tweaked them because she guessed Kim would prefer a female love interest instead. She was right, and the story ends up changing into a Coming-Out Story.
  • In RWBY: Scars, most of Salem's underlings are changed into women.
  • In Yokai Watch Re!, Pinkipoo is female. In the games Pinkipoo are only male.
  • Harboured & Encompassed (Modern AU Hornblower fic) has a male to female Gender Flip. Midshipman (No First Name) Clayton becomes Hannah Clayton who is Archie's neighbour.
  • This gender flip Shigeko Kageyama AKA Mob in which Mob of Mob Psycho 100 is born female and the entire series is retold through this. A character exploration and deconstruction of the usual gender flipped tropes in the fandom.
  • A series of articles on The Muppets fansite Tough Pigs imagine the Muppet movies being recast without the Muppets, with various gimmicks to keep it interesting. For The Great Muppet Caper, the gimmick is said to be that they're mostly improv comedians, but it quickly becomes apparent that it's this. (Tina Fey as Kermit; John C. Reilly as Piggy; Amy Poehler as Fozzie; and so on, including John Cleese and Joan Sanderson as Joan Sanderson and John Cleese.)
  • In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Dodoria, male in the original Dragon Ball Z, was turned into a girl for the abridged series. This was Played for Laughs to invoke Unsettling Gender-Reveal. (And also because the 'canon' reveal of Frieza destroying Vegeta's home planet was already common knowledge in the abridged series.)
  • Played with in Sailor Moon Abridged. Sailor Jupiter is still a girl like in canon, but she's pre-op transgender rather than cis female.
  • In A Tale of Two Rulers, Zelda's daughter Rinku is the current reincarnation of Link.
  • Dwarfs in Wicked Wiles are not a One-Gender Race. They almost all use he/him pronouns and look (and sound) masculine, but some are considered female by human standards. Grumpy and Happy would be considered female.
  • In the Ever After High fic Queens, Briar Light's three sisters are turned into brothers.
  • In the fanfic White Magnolia, Pink Chrysanthemum, Mulan is born a man named Ping. He also still falls in love with Shang, whose feelings are mutual.
  • In the King Kong (2005) fanfic More Than a Monster, Ann Darrow and Jack Driscoll are gender-flipped, and named Anthony Darrow and Jacklyn Drissel (though "Jack Driscoll" is her pseudonym to hide her gender).
  • While the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were all boys in the source material, in Hamato Clan Kunoichi they are all girls. With differing chromosomes comes an Adaptation Name Change; Leonardo is now Artemisia ("Misa"), Donatello is now Sofonisba ("Sofie"), Raphael is Lavinia ("Vini") and Michelangelo is Elisabetta ("Ellie").
  • In A Hero's Wrath, Kurogiri is instead Miss Kuro.
  • In Naruto fanfics, this trope is very commonly applied to Haku.
  • Wings of Rebellion and its predecessor Unfiltered has the Persona 5 protagonist Akira Kurusu as a girl, who develops a relationship with Goro Akechi that leaves him to defect from the Conspiracy and aid her and the Phantom Thieves.
  • In the Alternate Tail Series, the Edolas versions of Gajeel and Levy are female and male respectively, whereas they were the same gender as their Earthland counterparts in the anime.
  • The Transformers fanfic series you want the world/well what's it worth? is set in a world in which the majority of the bots are females (as well as humans involved in the American political scene).
  • In the Inspector Gadget (2015) fanfic Take Two (And DON'T Call Me in the Morning!), Fidget and Digit are female (and more humanoid, to boot).
  • In Rise of the Save-Ums, Max and Alexa, the human equivalents of Foo (female) and Noodle (male), are male and female, respectively.
  • My Father's Son: In this adaptation Allyria Dayne is instead Aleric Dayne, so that with Ashara and Arthur off at King's Landing, they can have someone of age to rule there after Their father's death. It also changes the political dynamics as Ynys Yronwood marries him, basically creating a union between the two strongest minor houses of Dorne.
  • Ben 10: Reincario: Canon Immigrant Lord Decibel is female in this story when she was male in the reboot show.
  • In bluebellwren's Ace Combat fanfictions Three Strikes and The Demon's Song both Trigger and Blaze are women.
  • Turtle Kittens:
    • While canon has all of the Turtles as boys, here Donatello and Michelangelo — renamed "Donnatella" and "Mikelangela" — are girls.
    • Instead of April O'Neil, she is replaced with "August O'Neil".
  • The Seton Academy: Join the Pack! fanfic Seton Academy Reversed has Ranka Okami go from a girl to the male Ranga, while Jin Mazama goes from a guy to the female Jun.
  • In the There Was Once an Avenger From Krypton universe, Harry Potter is a girl, having been raised as a boy to help better hide her from vengeful Death Eaters.
  • 1-X: Since it's established that each class is comprised of 20 students, and that canonically there were only 13 girls between Class 1-A and 1-B, Nanocowie decided to change six of the boys into girls, picking Shoto Todoroki, Eijiro Kirishima, Fumikage Tokoyami, Rikido Sato, Hanta Sero, and Koji Koda, becoming Shoko Todoroki, Eiko Kirishima, Futako Tokoyami, Rika Sato, Hana Sero, and Koko Koji.
  • Beauty Within the Beast is based on the Disney version of the fairy tale, but takes place in the modern day and gender-flips several characters: the Belle counterpart is a young man named Billy, the Beast is a spoiled heiress named Isla, the Gaston counterpart is a blonde Alpha Bitch named Gastelle, and Lumiere's counterpart is a woman by the name of Lenore.
  • Inferior or Superior: The fic's version refers to Ravage as "her" upon being sent into battle, whereas Ravage was male in all iterations of Transformers canon he appears in, at least at the time it was written.
  • Survive the Night: During the events of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, instead of having a son named Steven, Jamie Lloyd has a daughter named after her sister, Rachel.
  • A Wolf in the Garden: In Warhammer 40000, Ulthanesh is a hero from Aeldari mythology, and is referred to as being male. When Leman meets Ulthanesh amongst the other dead warriors in Khorne's realm, she's female. Given that Eldar mythology is notably fragmented and self-contradicting even in canon, however, this isn't a particularly big leap.
  • Tarzana is an almost exact retelling of Tarzan (1999), with the caveat that Tarzan and Jane, who are male and female respectively in the original movie, are the opposite genders and renamed Tarzana and John.

Films — Animation 

Literature 

  • Aniara: The narrator is male in the poem, the 2018 film adaptation turned him into a lesbian woman.
  • Ascendance of a Bookworm: In-Universe, The Story of Fernestine is Elvira's retelling of Ferdinand's life, in which Ferdinand's counterpart is female among many changes that were made to keep the general public from knowing that the events are based on a real person's life.
  • Trivigaunte, in The Book Of The Long Sun, is essentially a parody of fundamentalist Islam, but with the genders reversed.
  • Cinderellis And The GlassHill, by Gail Carson Levine (and based on a Norwegian fairy tale called The Princess on the Glass Hill), makes Cinderella a boy (Ellis, nicknamed 'Cinderellis'), with two older brothers and a princess as a love interest. (But note the comments about Cinderlad above.)
  • Dinosaur Cove was originally published from 2008 to 2012, starring two boys named Tom and Jamie. When the series was republished as Dinosaur Club in 2022, Tom was changed into a girl named Tess.
  • Terry Pratchett is fond of genderswapped gags in his Discworld books.
    • In Moving Pictures, a film image of a woman is possessed by an Eldritch Abomination, who transforms into a 50-foot monster. It immediately grabs up the Librarian (a male ape), and attempts to climb the 888-foot Tower of Art at Unseen University.
    • Equal Rites has elements of A Wizard of Earthsea, with Esk in Ged's role, and Granny Weatherwax as both the unnamed village witch and Ged's mentor Ogion.
    • And then there's the non-Discworld story Once and Future where a time traveller stuck in the past ends up re-enacting Arthurian Legend ... except for that the king who pulls the sword from the stone happens to be a woman.
  • The Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel The Knight, the Fool and the Dead has three interludes in which the story of "Godfather Death" is told; by Barbara to the First Doctor, by the Ninth to Rose, and by the Eighth to Brian the Ood. In Eight's version, Death's godchild is a girl. (The princess remains a princess.)
  • Honor Harrington, in her role as Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE!!
  • Gender Bender variants of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (where a male Jekyll becomes a female Hyde) are actually fairly common, but Two Women Of London: The Strange Case of Ms. Jekyll and Mrs. Hyde is a feminist Gender Flip version of the story.
  • Gender Swapped Greek Myths by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett is exactly that, including gender-flipped versions of Persea and Medeus, Arachnus the Weaver, Thesea and the Minoheifer, Pygmalia and Galateus, and Atalantus the Male Huntress.
  • The Mina Davis books Hungover and Handcuffed and Asshole Yakuza Boyfriend are gender-flipped film noir; the Hardboiled Detective is a woman, as is her Friend on the Force and The Don, while the Femme Fatales are mostly male.
  • Marianne Wiggins' John Dollar, which reworks Lord of the Flies with a group of marooned girls.
  • The Khaavren Romances are a fantasy recycling of the D'Artagnan Romances (The Three Musketeers and its sequels). The Porthos-equivalent, Tazendra, is female. This leads to interesting results, as the original is very much a Boisterous Bruiser, a character-type almost always male, and applying these traits to Tazendra not only makes her a rare female example, but also results in her having some of the traits of The Lad-ette.
  • The retelling of "Pride and Prejudice" "Lady Pride And Mister Prejudice" is built around this trope, the only characters who retain their original gender being Mrs Bennet and Sir Lucas.
  • Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined was rewritten by Meyer herself to show that Bella would have reacted the same way to all the over-powering supernatural beings around her if she was a guy named Beau (though Beau is described as a little more OCD and a lot less angry). Every character is flipped save for Bella/Beau's parents, as Meyer felt it would have been harder to justify the dad getting custody and only later moving in with the mom.
  • "The Maid Freed From The Gallows": The oldest variant is about a woman being condemned, but later other variants came along that changed her to a man.
  • Matilda: Roald Dahl got the idea of a story about a boy called Billy developing telekinesis, but got writer's block and did a gender flip.
  • Musketeer Space is another gender-flipped The Three Musketeers (with the exception of Athos, for some reason), literally Recycled In Space. D'Artagnan becomes Dana, mysterious assassin Milady de Winter becomes alien spy Milord de Winter, etc. And Aramis continues to sleep with every woman around.
  • Babette Cole's Prince Cinders Gender Flips Cinderella, where Cinders is a skinny spotty fellow forced to clean up after his hairy older brothers and falls in love with a beautiful princess.
  • Scavenge the Stars: The main character Amaya Chandra is a female adaptation of the male Edmond Dantes from The Count of Monte Cristo. This becomes downplayed later, as she's eventually revealed to be a Decomposite Character with all of the more ruthless chessmastery of Edmond going to her father and mentor, Boon.
  • The protagonist of Steel Beach by John Varley actually has an Easy Sex Change, but invokes this trope. The protagonist calls him/herself Hildy Johnson as both a male and female. Hildy is also a reporter in the book, and chose the name.
  • In Time Scout, one of the theories floating around is that the Ripper Watch Team might be looking for Jill the Ripper.

Music 

  • The Vocaloid song in the Evillious Chronicles, Lunacy of Duke Venomania by mothy, features the eponymous duke, played by Gakupo, converting various women into his sex slaves. Then comes The Madness of Miss Venomania from fans, which changes the protagonist to a girl, played by Luka, but subverts the trope by keeping all of her victims female (though there are heterosexual female versions if you look around).
  • The famous duet "Baby, It's Cold Outside" is usually sung with a man as the "Wolf" and a woman as the "Mouse". Exceptions:
    • It was first introduced in the movie Neptune's Daughter by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalbán. She plays "The Mouse" and he plays "The Wolf", as you would expect. But the song is soon reprised by Betty Garrett and Red Skelton, and this time he's the one who's resisting and she's the one who's advancing.
    • Again flipped in a version with Selma Blair and Rainn Wilson. Oh My!
    • Probably in a Shout-Out (or not, this is Miss Piggy after all), one episode of The Muppet Show had Miss Piggy being the "Wolf" to guest star Rudolf Nureyev's "Mouse".
    • The Muppets seem to enjoy flipping this song: years later, in Lady Gaga & The Muppets' Holiday Spectacular, Lady Gaga was the "Wolf" to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's "Mouse".
    • The She & Him version has Zooey Deschanel singing the "Wolf" part and M. Ward doing the "Mouse" part.
  • Duran Duran has the video for "Girl Panic", that portrays the band as sexy girls, all of them famous top-models getting in the skin of every band member.
  • As a kind of homage to Robert Palmer's "Addicted to Love" video, Shania Twain's "Man! I Feel like a Woman" video is the gender-flip version of the former.
  • Elton John once said Robert Palmer's video for "Addicted to Love" was a gender-flip of Elton's song "Bennie and the Jets", as Bennie was a girl singer and the Jets were her all-male, homogenous-looking backing band.
  • In The Mechanisms concept album "The Bifrost Incident", the traditionally male Loki and Odin are women, although Loki is still sung by a man.
  • In Warriors (2024), a Concept Album adaptation of the film The Warriors, the titular Warriors are changed from all male to all female. Likewise, the male Cyrus is now a woman, and the girl-gang the Lizzies are turned into a male gang called the Bizzies.
  • Sam Tsui and Alex Goot's cover of "Castle on the Hill" by Sheeran changes the gender of one of the friends. In the original version Sheeran sings "One's already on his second wife" where Tsui sings "One's already on her second wife"

Other 

  • The Rockman Ability pachislot game reimagines Dr. Light as a beautiful young woman instead of an old man. Downplayed in her character bio, which states she's the daughter of the original Dr. Light.

Podcasts 

  • Are You Afraid Of The Dark Universe does this in several pitches for Universal Horror remakes in their efforts to make their world more diverse than the source material.
    • Gabriel Utterson, the original protagonist of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is turned into Gabbi Utterson in Jekyll X Hyde.
    • This setting’s version of the Phantom of the Opera is female.
    • Peyton Westlake, the title character of Darkgirl, is a gender glip of the originl film's protagonist of the same name. Her love interest Jules is one as well, being a male version of the original film's Julie.
  • The god Palandine is normally male and the husband of Mishakal in the Dragonlance setting, but in The Fallen Gods Palandine is female and Mishakal's wife.
  • In the original continuity of the Red Panda Adventures, a one-off mention is made of the Red Panda having had a teenage sidekick. In the main continuity episode "The World Next Door", we learn that said sidekick, the Flying Squirrel, was a boy named Kent Baxter. This is quite a shock to the main universe's Flying Squirrel, adult woman Kit Baxter, especially, as she later reveals, because Kent was the name her parents would have given her had she been born a boy. A Sequel Episode, "A Dish Best Served Cold", also makes reference to the Necromator, who the Red Panda assumes was a male version of one of his female supervillains, Professor Zombie.
  • In Wolverine: The Lost Trail, the Master Mold A.I. is female rather than male.

Pro Wrestling 

  • Unlike other women's promotions at the time, which usually didn't feature male talent, Mildred Burke's WWWA reversed the standard gender dynamics of four\five male title belts and 1\2 female titles, having five women's divisions and two male divisions, albeit, midget male divisions.

Puppet Shows 

  • In Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock, not only is Doc female, but there are references to her unseen landlady, Mrs. Shimmelfinny; the original Doc's unseen neighbour was Ned Shimmelfinny. Henchy, sidekick to the World's Oldest Fraggle is also female.
  • In The Muppets' Wizard of Oz, Rizzo the Rat takes the role of the Queen of the Field Mice, which has been conflated with the Mayor of Munchkinland.
  • Conversational Troping in The Muppets (2015) episode "Got Silk?", when Uncle Deadly says his theatre group is performing a gender flipped Clueless (although in the performance we see, Deadly is playing Cher in drag because the leading lady cancelled - in a podcast, Deadly's puppeteer, Matt Vogel, suggested that it was actually an all Cross-Cast Roles production). Apparently it works better than their previous play; a gender flipped Knocked Up.
  • Sesame Street: In Episode 3408 when Celina's dance class acted out the song and story of the "Alligator King" cartoon, the seven alligator sons were changed to alligator kids, given that some of the kids in the class were female. The seventh and youngest kid in particular was played by the female Gabi.

Tabletop Games 

  • Hero Realms does this a bit literally. Character Packs are custom starting decks based on traditional Fantasy RPG classes. Each pack comes with Character Cards and Health Trackers, with each having one side featuring a male version of the Character, and on the other side with a female version. Other than aesthetics, the gameplay is not affected.
  • In Nomine: A few characters derived from scripture or the public domain have their genders flipped to provide more gender diversity in what would otherwise be a heavily male-dominated lineup, which is explained in-universe through gender being a very optional and malleable concept for Celestials. For instance, while Gabriel is male when his gender is mentioned in the scriptures and Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Israfel" describes the titular angel as male, both are women in the game.
  • Ravenloft, in its fifth edition version, replaces a few originally male Darklords with similar female characters: Vlad Drakov became Vladeska, Victor Mordenheim became Viktra, and Pieter van Riese became Pietra. Vladeska is less evil than Vlad was (being a militaristic, power-hungry tyrant, but at least not a bigot or a rapist), Pietra is worse than Pieter (going from an obsessed explorer who murdered his own crew to a pirate with a long career of atrocities), and Viktra more or less stayed at her predecessor's moral level (i.e. heavily in the red) but as a full Darklord while Victor's status as such was more ambiguous.
  • The Grandville RPG gives Chance Lucas, the Captain Ersatz of Lucky Luke from Grandville: Noel, a mare named Jolie as his detective partner; a gender flipped (and Anthropomorphic Shifted) Jolly Jumper.
  • Res Arcana: The Alternative Mage Packs contain gender-flipped re-imaginings of the gender-equal ensembles of mages.
  • The backstory to the first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons module Beyond the Crystal Cave is that the Garden is a demiplane created by the mage Porpherio Profoundeus as somewhere he could take his love, the half-elven princess Caerwyn. In the 5e version (part of Quests From the Infinite Staircase), amongst other changes, Porpherio is now a woman named Porphura. Caerwyn is still Caerwyn.

Theatre 

  • The English National Opera production of Duke Bluebeard's Castle had Judith played by Crispin Lord, suggesting Bluebeard found a husband instead of a new wife.
  • In the Broadway version of The Lion King, Julie Taymor changed Rafiki's gender from male to female to combat The Smurfette Principle. Since it didn't change Rafiki's role at all, it works quite well.
  • There was a stage play of "Sleeping Beauty" where the beauty was played by a guy and it was the girl who administered the Wake-Up Kiss.
  • Neil Simon wrote a version of The Odd Couple with every role gender swapped, simply called The Female Odd Couple. The biggest difference is that the British Pigeon sisters are changed to a pair of Spanish brothers, whose names and accents become the source of a great deal of wordplay.
  • Oh My Godmother is the classic Cinderella story retold in modern-day San Francisco in which "Cinderella" is now a love-struck, gay, teenage boy.
  • There's also an official female-cast version of 12 Angry Men (making it Twelve Angry Women). Since women now serve on American juries, modern productions are often staged as Twelve Angry Jurors where the director can cast whichever roles he or she feels like as women.
  • Errand Into The Maze by Martha Graham is a Gender Flip of the Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, expressing in dance. The creature may or may not be entirely in her mind, representing Fear.
  • William Shakespeare's King Lear has had incarnations that explore this technique:
    • In Lear (Maleczech, 1990), Lear was a queen and the conflict on division of the realm was among three sons, rather than three daughters. All of the dialog was left as found (save for pronouns).
    • Queen Lere was a feminist production that had women in all the roles, updated language, and things turned out much less tragically. Little bit of "agenda", in that one.
    • Akira Kurosawa's Ran has his Lear analogue divide his realm between three sons. Except one of them is basically married to Lady Macbeth and it ends really really badly for everyone.
    • Thirteenth Floor Theatre's 2017 production changed Kent to a woman - who then disguises herself as a man. The Fool also became a woman - strongly implied to be the ghost of Lear's dead wife. Goneril's servant Oswald became female too with the resulting fight between Oswald and Kent becoming a Designated Girl Fight.
  • Jasper in Deadland:
    • The River Lethe is named after Mr. Lethe, even though Lethe was a goddess in Greek Mythology.
    • Some productions cast Jasper as a female role.
  • There was a production of Julius Caesar in which Caesar was played by a woman, but still referred to by the male pronoun. Calpurnia, however, became Calpurnius, and he got his pronouns changed. (The production had other changes as well: it thought it was set in a dance club 20 Minutes into the Future.)
  • Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" took the ballet and turned all the swans into male characters.
  • Gender flipping is not terribly uncommon in modern productions of Shakespeare. Since all of the women's roles in Shakespeare are actually roles for boys in drag, having women onstage at all is nontraditional casting; it doesn't take much of a leap to consider putting women in other roles as well. Also, especially in the case of student or amateur productions, there may be a surplus of female performers and a shortage of good male ones if you don't do this.
    • The practice is older than you'd think. Sarah Bernhardt, the most celebrated actress of her day, played Hamlet on the stage in 1899. Curiously, part of a performance was filmed as Le Duel de Hamlet, making the "first movie Hamlet" a woman!
    • Sara Bernhardt is by no means the only female Hamlet in movies — Hamlet (1921) had Asta Nielsen as a female Hamlet who had been reared as a boy, and was much more interested in Horatio than Ophelia.
    • Amateur Shakespeare productions often do this simply to allow more casting balance, with no change to the plot whatsoever. Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream, for instance, has no real need to be male or female, so the role can easily be cast for the best performer of either sex. Likewise, many minor characters are presumed to be male, but could just as easily be female.
      • This is nearly always done to Titania's fairy servants. They were originally played by boys, as boys. Bottom even calls them things like "Monsieur Mustardseed" and "Master Cobweb". The more modern female association with fairies, coupled with the fact that a lot more girls will usually audition for any given production of Midsummer, leads to the gender flip.
      • Numerous 21st century productions of Midsummer have introduced same-sex relationships between the lovers by turning Lysander or Helena (or both) into Lysandra and/or Helenus. A female Lysander can add an interesting dimension to the "forbidden love" aspect of her relationship with Hermia and lend a homophobic explanation to Egeus' opposition to this relationship, while a male Helena can turn Demetrius' character arc into a Coming-Out Story and lend credence to the theory that he was in denial of his true feelings at the beginning of the story (because, in this case, he was closeted).
    • The Tempest also sees a few roles often get flipped. Ariel becoming female is an obvious one, but Stephano or Trinculo also may become a female to make the subtext between the two more palatable and Prospero can sometimes become a woman named Prospera as well; this last one has the greatest impact as Prospero and his daughter Miranda are two of the main characters and the relationship between them changes when it's a mother and daughter rather than a father and daughter. Other roles that have gotten get this treatment include Antonio (thus becoming Antonia), Adrian, Sebastian, and Francisco.
    • National Theatre's 2017 production of Twelfth Night cast Maldonado as a female, named Maldonada in the play, which gave the scenes where she believed that Olivia desired her an added twist. Fabio was also cast as a female, although in her case it didn't change the role much, apart from allowing her to dress as Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens for the entire performance.
  • In some productions of Oliver!, the Artful Dodger is played by a girl, and actually referenced as such in the play (with the additional few lines of "Dodger's a girl?" "So what if I am? I could lick you any day!"). It doesn't have much bearing on the plot whether Dodger is played by a boy or girl, though.
  • At one Discworld Convention, a group did a dramatisation of the scene in Interesting Times where the Silver Horde are hanging around waiting for the battle, with a female Truckle the Uncivil. During the discussion of the afterlife, she delivered the line about a paradise full of young women as if she'd just spotted the flaw, and her response to Cohen's "And that's your reward, is it?" was "Dunno. Maybe it's me punishment". (In the original it's "Maybe it's their punishment".)
  • Maureen's partner Joanne Jefferson in RENT is a Gender Flipped version of Musetta's lover Alcindoro in La Bohème.
  • A Contemporary Theatre's 2012 production of A Christmas Carol gender-flipped the Ghost of Christmas Present, for only the third time in the show's history (in the mid-1980s the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, as a nod to the areas Scandinavian heritage, Christmas Present was a St. Lucia expy rather than Father Christmas/Santa Claus; in 1990, an actress played all three ghosts).
  • Cirque du Soleil's Amaluna is a loose adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest with a 70% female cast; for example, the main character, Prospero, becomes Prospera, the queen of the titular island.
  • Samuel Beckett was adamant that this not be done to Waiting for Godot. When he took legal action against an all-female Dutch theater company and lost, he declared a ban on all productions of his plays in The Netherlands. When asked by the press why he felt so strongly about this matter, Beckett replies "Because women don't have prostates", referring to one of the characters in the play's prostate disease. Female casts have still gone ahead, but not without having to wrangle with his estate.
  • Productions of The Hobbit, especially for children, often add an elf queen rather than the king from the book—which makes sense, since the book literally has no female characters whatsoever. Tolkien canon does not specify anything about Thranduil's wife other than she must exist, because Thranduil has a son, Legolas; however, Thranduil is a bit character in The Hobbit and the story will not lose anything if he's replaced by a queen. Other productions have had Gollum, a relatively genderless role even in the book, played by women.
  • In Shrek: The Musical, the Three Blind Mice are females, while in the films they're males.
  • In the original novel Les Misérables, the overseer who fires Fantine is a woman, Mme. Victurnien, who kicks her out simply for being an unwed mother. In the stage show, the unnamed Foreman is male, and is given the additional motive of Fantine turning down his romantic advances.
  • Gioachino Rossini's Cinderella-based opera, La Cenerentola replaces the stepmother with a stepfather, Don Magnifico, and the fairy godmother with a male mortal philosopher, Alidoro, making this considerably Older Than Radio.
  • The musical adaptation of The Toxic Avenger makes Mayor Belgoody a woman.
  • A short-lived 2011 revised production of On a Clear Day You Can See Forever turned Daisy Gamble into David Gamble.
  • In the stage musical of Nativity!, the Critic, played by Alan Carr in the film, is Jo Brand.
  • The Musical of Mrs. Doubtfire gender-flips Jonathan Lundy into Janet Lundy.
  • Cats: Rumpelteazer is implied to be male in the original Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats poems but is female in the Cats play.
  • The Cutie Honey stage play Cute Honey: Emotional makes Professor Kisaragi into a woman.
  • A 2020 Scottish adaptation of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, in addition to relocating it to Argyll, becomes Mrs. Puntila and her Man Matti, with the title character being played by Elaine C. Smith.
  • In the National Theatre's 2014 production of Treasure Island, protagonist Jim Hawkins is a girl (her full name is mentioned at one point to be Jemima). Dr. Livesey is also female, as are several of the sailors and pirates.
  • In Jake Heggie's opera adaptation of It's a Wonderful Life, the Guardian Angel Clarence Oddbody is recast as Clara.
  • Productions of The Drowsy Chaperone needing more female roles will commonly flip the Man in Chair (becoming "Woman in Chair") or at least one of the pastry chef mobsters.
  • Prince Kaguya changes Kaguya from a girl to a boy who is Raised as the Opposite Gender.
  • The 2018 West End revival of Company (Sondheim) changed Robert into Bobbie, Amy into Jamie and Robert's girlfriends April, Marta and Kathy into Andy, PJ and Theo.
  • David Greig's stage play of Solaris makes Dr. Sartorius female and gender-swaps Kris Kelvin and his Lost Lenore Rheya, renaming the latter Ray.
  • In ''Hadestown the character of Hermes was originally written for a man, but it pretty quickly became a role that a woman could play too, to the point that it's just as likely that Hermes will be a man or a woman from production to production. Lillias White's version is referred to as Missus Hermes and "a gal with feathers on her feet", among other changes. By the time the show opened on the West End, Melanie la Barrie's Hermes had eschewed most gendered references, including changing "Mister/Missus Hermes" to "Excuse me, Hermes".

Toys 

  • A few Care Bears have had their genders flipped over the decades in both the toyline and the different animated shows, namely Funshine Bear (female to male) and Secret Bear (male to female). Even some of the cousins are not immune to this trope: Lotsa Heart Elephant (went from being a male to a female), Proud Heart Cat is generally female (but at one point was referred to as a male), and Swift Heart Rabbit switches from being male to female.
  • Strawberry Shortcake: Plum Puddin' in the original Strawberry Shortcake (1980s) line was originally a boy, but due to Huckleberry Pie's low toy sales, Plum never recieved a toy until "he" was reintroduced to the line as a "she". Plum would eventually become a boy once more in Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City.
  • One infamous figurine released early in G1 of My Little Pony has Moondancer and Glory in wedding attire. They're both female in canon but for the figurine Glory was male. Fans ignore the gender flip.
  • Japanese figure maker Kotobukiya have turned famous horror movie characters like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Chucky and Edward Scissorhands into cute and sexy women.
  • Monster High is a Mattel toyline of dolls who are children of the classic monsters, generally with the gender flipped as is directed toward girls (so, logically, most characters will be female); including Draculaura (Dracula), Frankie Stein (Frankenstein), Clawdeen (the Wolf Man), Cleo (the Mummy) and of course the opposite case with Deuce Gorgon (Medusa).
  • Ever After High depicts the Cheshire Cat as Kitty Cheshire's mother, when the character was male in the novel by Lewis Carroll.

Video Games 

  • Technically all games where you can pick the gender of your Player Character feature gender flipped versions of the protagonist. No matter if you play as male or female, your character is given the same backstory, same quests, and same character arc. A good example is BioWare's Mass Effect trilogy, where Shepard is given the same last name, familial backstory, and pre-service record regardless of gender, so the male and female versions of Shepard are essentially Gender Flipped alternate versions of each other. Some games, however, like Fallout 4, avert this by making the male and female versions of the Player Character distinct. In the case of Fallout 4, the male and female versions of the Sole Survivor are husband and wife, the former a retired military veteran, and the latter an out-of-practice lawyer and stay-at-home mother. The PC of the chosen gender is the only one to survive the prologue and a main part of the character's motivation through the story is finding the one who kidnapped their son and killed their spouse.
  • Super Princess Peach gave Peach a starring role where she saves the Super Mario Bros.. from Bowser for a change, instead of the brothers setting out to rescue her as in so many previous Mario games. Also, the subplot of Super Mario Galaxy appears to be a gender-flipped version of The Little Prince.
  • Dr. Julie Langford from BioShock was originally a man named Holden Langford, but Ken Levine made her female to add more female characters to the game. The art subtitles still mistakenly read "Holden Langford" for every sign in her lab.
  • Story of Seasons: Harvest Moon: Back to Nature For Girls (PlayStation), More Friends of Mineral Town (Game Boy Advance), Harvest Moon Another Wonderful Life (GameCube), and Harvest Moon DS Cute. All four had official localizations, though the first one was not translated until the PSP compilation Boy and Girl. Future games allow you to choose your gender at the start.
  • The three Tokimeki Memorial Girl's Side games. The Nintendo DS ports of the first two Girl's Side games also have complete fan translations.
  • Warriors Orochi features a female Tang Sanzang (Sanzou Houshi). This is likely a nod to the old Koei game Saiyuki: Journey West, where you can choose Sanzang's gender.
  • Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- where Ashuku Nyorai/Akṣobhya is inexplicably female (though still voiced by a guy). She gets flipped again in the anime where she's a crossdressing guy instead.
    • While the actual Mahāmayūrī is occasionally depicted as male, she is officially a female deity in Buddhist mythos. In the game, King Konjikikujaku is a dashing young man.
  • In Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny, Word of God states that the Yagyu Jubei who is the main character is the grandfather of the Yagyu Jubei. ...then Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams comes out and there's a Jubei (it's a title in the family) and she's his granddaughter... Any sign of a lovely eyepatch?
  • Onmyoji features a male Tamamo-no-Mae.
  • Paper Chase: The English professor goes from male in the BASIC version to female in the Inform version.
  • Due to the personalized nature of Personas in the Persona series, some of the personal Personas of the playable characters have this happen to them.
  • Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth likes to play around this a lot. Most of the movie OCs that the party encounters are Gender flipped from what they actually are, as they are originally all people in Hikari's cognition given forms by Persona users who got dragged into the movies.
    • Kamoshidaman, the superhero of his titular movie, has nothing to do with the Obviously Evil pervert rapist teacher that he resembles. Instead, he's actually a teacher in Hikari's primary school who is seen as "absolute authority", who is a woman.
    • Yosukesaurus, the outcast dinosaur of Junessic Land, has nothing to do with Yosuke, nor is he as calm and determined as the real one. He's actually Hikari in secondary school who was being isolated by her friends for having different opinions about dealing with bullied students.
    • The Overseer, resembling the seemingly friendly and punny chairman of S.E.E.S, has no relation to the real thing. It's actually a hybrid cognition of Hikari's Education Relatives who destroyed her completely by suggesting that she should get a good resume then a "normal" office worker job instead of letting her become a movie director.
    • The Big Bad Nagi, actually the Mesopotamian God of justice and storms "Enlil" is a woman, even in her One-Winged Angel form where she was clearly masculine. The original god is actually a man.
  • Final Fantasy XIII:
    • Lightning was billed as a Distaff Counterpart to Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife. This got hilarious when fans of the series, after decades of extremely pretty and androgynous heroes, were all too ready to complain that Lightning was "just another girl-faced guy". Until they found out that she actually was a girl. In fact, Lightning being mistaken for a pretty boy is almost a Running Gag in the games themselves, not helped that Square Enix once used her to model in a men's fashion magazine.
    • Fang from the same game was initially conceived as a sexy male character, but eventually became a sexy female character (letting them desexualise Lightning, which they wanted to do). As a result, she ended up subverting the usual gender roles of Final Fantasy, and became quite popular as a result. Especially notable is that Fang's gender flip had little, if any, effect on her relationship with Vanille.
  • Sengoku Basara features a gender-flipped Saika Magoichi. However, this is subverted in that it could be any woman who has taken the title 'Saika Magoichi' to lead the Saika mercs. The real life Suzuki Shigehide (the best known Saika Magoichi) is said to have had a wife/sister/daughter, and she could very well be any one of them.
  • In Tekken, Kunimitsu was initially a palette swap of Yoshimitsu, but in the second game, was gender flipped and given a mostly-new moveset.
  • AkaSeka features a male Murasaki Shikibu.
  • In Bionic Commando Rearmed, Hal was replaced by Haley.
  • Samus from Metroid was (like Aliens above) gender-neutral until the very end where the designers decided to add a twist to the end. The twist? Create a new trope! Samus Is a Girl indeed.
  • One of the playable characters of Otogi 2: Immortal Warriors is the cold and stoic imperial sorceress Seimei, a major protagonist and spiritual guide who's based on the real-life man and legendary Japanese folk-figure Abe no Seimei.
  • Choice of Games: The game Choice of Broadsides allows you to play an entire genre under Gender Flipped conditions: rather than force the protagonist to be male, the player has the option of changing the setting to being Wooden Ships and Iron Women. Choice of Romance is somewhat similar, but not quite as pronounced — the game culture is a bisexual one. The player's choice of character sex and sexual orientation determines the sex of his/her suitors, but the suitors' characters remain the same.
  • Kirby Star Allies: Longtime recurring enemy Broom Hatter, who had previously been referred to as female up until this point, is suddenly referred to with male pronouns.
  • In the original Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, when Guybrush calls the LucasArts Help Desk (then LucasFilm Games Help Desk) on Dinky Island, the phone operator on the other end of the phone appears near him... and it appears to be a woman named Chester! In the redrawn Special Edition, however, Chester the phone operator is now a man. Interestingly, both characters can be found in the Special Edition version, with female Chester appearing in Classic mode and male Chester appearing in the high-definition mode, and both characters even have unique voice actors.
  • The Flower Shop: Summer in Fairbrook was a 2010 indie game about gardening and relationships. It was followed up with a reverse harem game called Winter in Fairbrook the next year.
  • The main games in Red Entertainment's Sakura Wars franchise all feature male main characters.
    • Between 2010 and 2011, the same company created a similar two-part PS2 and PSP series called Scared Rider Zechs, with a female lead and a harem of men.
    • Also, a manga spinoff called Sakura Wars Kanadegumi began publication in 2011. It's a story about one girl and several guys that take place in the Sakura Wars universe.
  • The Shin Megami Tensei games have Louis Cypher as a recurring character. Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey has Louisa Ferre instead.
  • Strange Journey gets even stranger: everyone's favorite penis demon, Mara, is female for a change. Yes, she's still a penis.
  • In the original version of LucasArts' 1990 fantasy adventure game Loom, the main villain is Chaos, the King of the Dead. As an inhuman undead specter, Chaos' gender is determined only by the other characters' dialogue—and in the original release, they refer to him and he. In the rewritten talkie PC CD version, however, the dialogue is changed so Chaos becomes she. (This may have occurred in part because Chaos' design was based on the look of Maleficent.)
  • Milk, the hero of the NES game Nuts & Milk, was female in the earlier Japanese PC versions.
  • The Rip Van Fish are female in Something because they are pink and their Zs are replaced with hearts. They only show up in Only Water Level.
  • Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions has a female version of Doctor Octopus as the Big Bad of the Spider-Man 2099 portion of the game. Also, counts as a Twofer since she is of Indian descent.
  • The main antagonist of Spider-Man: Miles Morales is the Tinkerer, who is reimagined as a young woman instead of the elderly man from the comics.
  • One dad hacked a copy of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker to turn Link into a girl by changing all the gendered pronouns.
  • Tomb Raider star Lara Croft was originally envisioned as a man, but the character was changed into a woman because the developers felt that the character would be too similar to Indiana Jones.
  • The NES (and most well-known) version of Uninvited changed the protagonist's younger brother into an older sister who otherwise fills the same role.
  • Mega Man Battle Network's reimagining of Ring Man is female.
  • Shovel Knight added Body Swap Mode as part of the Treasure Trove update, allowing players to switch the genders of whichever major characters they choose, updating the sprites and dialog to match. The only thing it doesn't affect is the visuals of the intro cutscene, since the developers would have needed to create versions of the pixel art for every possible permutation of the main cast's genders.
  • Defense of the Ancients had Tresdin the Legion Commander, a mustachioed and racist man. In Dota 2 Tresdin has been retooled into a woman, is still a commander of a legion, and the racism is toned down but she is still aggressively adamant in her distrust of non-humans, especially demons after Stonehall.
  • In the NES version and one of the US arcade versions of the Capcom shoot-'em-up Legendary Wings, the two main characters of Michelle Heart and Kevin Walker are replaced by nameless angels, both of them male.
  • The Famicom game Final Mission featured two male commandos as the main characters. When the game was localized for the NES under the title of S.C.A.T.: Special Cybernetic Attack Team, one of them became female.
  • Batman: Arkham Origins has a female version of Copperhead as one of the boss characters. Batman even lampshades this by stating that all of the data he had thus far collected in relation to Copperhead indicated a man.
  • The tie-in game to Spider-Man 3 does this to Dr. Farley Stillwell, making him female.
  • The main character of the book Bedlam is Ross Baker (whose gamertag is Bedlam), a man. The main character of its video game adaptation, Bedlam, is Heather Quinn (whose gamertag was Athena), a woman (though the game's still named after the original protagonist). Word of God says he wanted a woman in the game because so few FPS protagonists are women, and says in retrospect that he should have made the main character of the book a woman, too.
  • Loved does this to the player. The voice asks you whether you're a man or a woman; if you respond "man", the voice refers to you as "girl" for the rest of the game, and if you answer "woman", it refers to you as "boy".
  • There's a part in The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky where the characters put on a School Play at the Academy. The students stage the classic play "The Madrigal of White Magnolias" but with gender-swapped casting: thus Estelle and Kloe play the dueling knights while Joshua is cajoled into playing the role of the princess.
  • The Bomberman series has the arcade spinoff Bomber Girl, focusing on an all-female (and human) cast of playable characters. The main two Bomber characters are even flips of White Bomberman (Shiro) and Black Bomberman (Kuro).
  • The Scooby-Doo video game Scooby-Doo, Who's Watching Who? features two suspects who are female versions of male villains from Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!:
    • One of the three suspects for the true identity of the Space Kook is Henrietta Bascombe, who is based on Henry Bascombe, the true identity of the Space Kook in the original series episode "Spooky Space Kook".
    • In the Oceanland level, one of the suspects for the true identity of the Ghost of Redbeard is Professor Alicia Wayne. She is loosely based on Professor Wayne from the original series episode "Scooby's Night with a Frozen Fright".
  • Heroes of the Storm: Two heroes have this. The Barbarian from Diablo III is almost always marketed as the male one, but the HotS team opted to create the female character Sonya for the barbarian representative. Likewise, the Siege Tank unit was male in both StarCraft games. Heroes instead use a female Canon Foreigner named Sgt. Hammer.
  • The Kunio-kun spinoff River City Girls has Misako and Kyoko rushing off to rescue Kunio and Riki.
  • In WarCraft III: Reforged, the Demon Hunter and the Death Knight in skirmishes can be optionally played as female variants, with voice lines to boot. Some of the creeps were changed from male to female, particularly the centaurs and satyrs. Count as Guys Smash, Girls Shoot since the swapped gender of those units were archers and spellcasters.
  • In most dubs of Doom Eternal, the computer voice that greets the Doom Slayer in Urdak is female. In the Polish dub, the voice is male.
  • When Ultima IV was ported to the NES, the female tinker Julia was changed to the male Julius.
  • Much like in Ant-Man and the Wasp, Iron Man VR presents Ghost as a black woman instead of a white man.
  • Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door: Bonetail is female in most versions of the original game, but was made male in the English translation. In the remake, she is female in all versions.
  • Mortal Kombat 1 acts as a Soft Reboot in a rebuilt timeline where many characters are given altered origin stories and backgrounds, and amidst them are Cyrax and Sektor — their previous incarnations were male, while the New Era incarnations are female. There's also arguably a case of this during a post-campaign Invasion storyline regarding an Alternate Timeline Scorpion, who is a woman by virtue of being Harumi Shirai, the surviving wife of the murdered Hanzo Hasashi (who becomes Scorpion in the normal timeline).
  • Limbus Company frequently does this when it adapts classic lit characters to suit the new roles they play. While male to female gender flips are the most common, there are a select few characters that are adapted from female to male.
  • Ripened Tingle's Balloon Trip of Love is loosely based on The Wizard of Oz, with the male Tingle in the Dorothy role and the Tin Man becoming a fembot named Buriki.

Visual Novels 

  • The Chinese epic Romance of the Three Kingdoms gets two H-Game then later three anime series that feature most of its historically male characters as attractive females: some voluptuous, some moe. As for the historically female characters, such as Diao Chan, the result in Koihime Musou was... terrifying.
  • The ChuSinGura 46+1 Visual Novel series by Inre turns almost all 46 ronin (you play as the time-traveling protagonist 47th one) and all members of The Shinsengumi into cute girls in microskirts who are all ready for you to screw, and in the case of the ronin, to knock up. It also has a surprising amount of plot and faithful historical references to the event as well.
  • The Eiyuu*Senki H-Game series by Tenco features a hodgepodge of cute, screwable gender flip (female) historical/legendary/mythological figures from all over the world, ranging from feudal Japan (Date Masamune, Yamato Takeru, Miyamoto Musashi, etc.), to China (Qin Shi Huang, Sun Tzu, Lu Bu, Jiang Ziya, etc.), to India (Ashoka), to Mongolia (Kubilai Khan), to the Americas (Christopher Columbus, Geronimo, Montezuma II, Wayna Qhapaq, Blackbeard, Kamehameha), to the Middle East (Hammurabi, Tutankhamun, Gilgamesh, Cambyses II, etc.), to Europe (Marco Polo, King Arthur and other Arthurian figures, Palamedes, Aristotle, Achilles, Heracles, Nostradamus, Alexander the Great, Caesar, Napoleon, Charlemagne, Beethoven, Faust, Leonardo da Vinci, Ferdinand Magellan, Ivan the Terrible, Grigori Rasputin, Copernicus, Cú Chulainn, Sigurd, Loki, etc.). Also features one cameo of Uesugi Kenshin from Sengoku Rance. A few characters are based on actual female figures, such as Himiko, Joan of Arc and Cleopatra.
  • The H-Game Sengoku Rance by AliceSoft re-imagines some historical figures of the Sengoku (Warring States) period such as Uesugi Kenshin and Yamamoto Isoroku, as cute, screwable girls.
  • Fate Series:
    • The series as it released is gender flipped compared to the scenario originally planned: Saber herself was originally going to be a male character and servant of a Meganekko who was the basis of Shirou and Rin. The original scenario was eventually turned into a 12-minute long OVA called Fate/Prototype and later expanded to the Fragments of Pale Silver novels.
    • In the parody manga Sensha Otoko: A True Tank Story, Waver Velvet is a girl and Iskandar's love interest. Enkidu, who in canon is Ambiguous Gender but is usually referred to with male pronouns, is a girl and Gilgamesh's love interest.
  • Colonel Sebastian Moran and Henry Irving have both been gender flipped in Shikkoku no Sharnoth, though for the former it's quite possible that it is not her real name.
  • The doujin soft game Go! Magical Boy is a Romance Game that switches the genders of the Magical Girl genre. Well, mostly — the player character looks like a girl to others when transformed and has to give up his powers to a legitimate girl in the end. So not the best game ever.
  • Koikari Love For Hire is a romcom Romance Game that reimagines Rent-A-Girlfriend, starring a male equivalent to Chizuru, in a web of deception between multiple girls and turning down their confessions because he's Only in It for the Money.
  • The Pia Carrot H-Game series had male main characters and a group of female love interests in its four Numbered Sequels and spinoffs. Then a reverse harem story called Prince Pia Carrot was released on Playstation Portable in October 2014 with just a CERO D rating.
  • Shall We Date?: My Fairy Tales does this to a majority of the love interests. They're all male counterparts to famous fairytale characters such as Snow White, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid and so on and so forth.
  • Shall We Date?: Oz features two love interests that are male versions of two original characters from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
  • The TaishoXAlice series of visual novels does a different take on fairy tales, folktales, and their female protagonists... by sending the heroine of the series into a fairy tale world where all of them are men. Even Alice and Princess Kaguya get included into this. And since this is also a Dating Sim, it stands to reason that miss Heroine is our prince character.
  • In the game mod based on Doki Doki Literature Club!, there is Doki Doki Switcheroo in which the main girls in the original game are reimagined as boys. This even extends to the default player character who is represented as a female in this version.
  • In traditional Sherlock Holmes stories, Inspector Lestrade is a man. The Great Ace Attorney reimagines Lestrade as a female pickpocket who joins the force between games.
  • Most titles in the Da Capo franchise feature a male lead and some adult content. Da Capo Girl's Symphony features a female lead and no adult content.

Web Animation 

Webcomics 

  • Arthur, King of Time and Space:
    • Tristram, Argavaine and Gareth are female in the space and contemporary arcs. Isolde is female in all arcs, and this makes no difference to Tristram's story. (However, Gareth's paramour becomes male in the space arc.)
    • Sir Bromell, Elaine of Carbonek's knight protector, is an interesting example — he's a male knight in the baseline arc just like in the legends, and female in the contemporary one (where she and Elaine only exist in Arthur's webcomic). But because AKOTAS-Elaine is based on Helen from Narbonic, the baseline Bromell is actually a gender-flipped version of Mell.
  • Magical Boys and Mahou Shounen Fight! gender-flips the Magical Girl Warrior series.
  • Spinnerette is a Gender Flip of Spider-Man.
  • In Homestuck, this is played with. The Scratched Universe introduces 4 new main characters: Roxy is the counterpart to Rose and Dirk is the counterpart to Dave, but John and Jade are gender flipped to Jane and Jake, respectively. Justified, as the post-Scratch kids are actually meant to correspond to the pre-Scratch characters' guardians rather than the kids themselves. John's father was born the traditional way rather than by ectobiology, so Jane represents his grandmother.
  • In Elsanna – Bram Stoker's Dracula, Elsa is the Expy to the titular Dracula from the 1992 film.
  • Within Miss Abbott and the Doctor is 10 chapters of Mister Abbott and the Doctor, with the genders of the main couple reversed.
  • In chapter 11 of Lotta Svärd: Women of War, Helle tells a scary story about four soldiers, who happen to look exactly like male versions of the four protagonists. Later on, the artist would release more detailed art of these flips and reveal their names: Tuure, Timo, Heikki and Launonote .
  • In The Wendybird, at least 75% of the original Peter Pan cast is genderbent. This includes Captain Hook and her crew, the mermaids, the Indians are now Amazons, the Lost Kids includes a few girls, and John and Michael are now Jean and Madeleine.
  • Downplayed in MoringMark - TOH Comics. It wasn't even clear if Grom had a gender in the original show as they're merely referred to as "it". Here, Grom is reinvisioned as a woman named Enna who bears an archivist curse, but the identity of the beast sealed inside her is still just as vague as it is in the show.

Web Original 

  • The official designation for the Nick Jr. logo from 1988 to 2009 is called "Father and Son", featuring an orange humanoid, Nick, and a smaller blue humanoid, Jr, both commonly envisioned as male. In The Noedolekcin Archives, Jr. is confirmed to be female through Word of God.
  • In Polokoa Quest, Chief is female in Rokolo's Compilation AI (CAI). In the story they originate from, he is male. Polokoa Quest is an alternative universe spinoff that has a number of changes to various characters from the original.

Web Videos 

  • The review of Partymania on The Spoony Experiment took place in a genderswapped 80s world. Linkara (or rather, his 90s Kid persona) became 80s Chick and Spoony became the giggly girly Spoonette. And Benzaie... let's not talk about Veronique.
  • In The Nostalgia Critic's The Phantom of the Opera (2004) review, male "Fan Dumb of the Opera" is stalking female Beth, but female Hyper is still wanting to force male Critic into being with her.
  • The Veronica Exclusive, a web series adaptation of Heathers makes Jason "J.D." Dean into Jane "J.D." Dean.
  • Funny or Die presented a parody of The Handmaid's Tale called The Handman's Tale, where men are in the role of the oppressed Handmen who live under the thumb of a theocratic society controlled by women.
  • Middlemarch: The Series reimagines Will Ladislaw as Billie Ladislaw, Mary Garth as Max Garth, and James Chettam as Jamie Chettam.
  • In The Emma Agenda, George Knightley is instead Jordan Knightley, and Jane Fairfax is Jon Fairfax.
  • Merry Maidens gender-flips Robin Hood and the Merry Men.
  • In SsethTzeentach's review of Wizardry 8, his party consists of several other YouTube personalities, with painstakingly-created animated portraits for each of them, including Fredrik Knudsen - who is made a woman, because all of the best magic-boosting trinkets in the game are only able to be equipped by women "and we need to minmax".
  • In Workin' Boys, Professor Hidgens is finally allowed to put on a production of the show he wrote about his college friends, but due to in-universe Executive Meddling it's now titled "Workin' Girls". Apart from swapping gendered terms like sorority to fraternity, his sole consideration for this change in the script was to replace all of the frequent uses of the word football with "football, but for girls".