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Gender Flip
aka: Gender Flipped

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https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/ghostmarvel_8.png
Left: Ghost in the comics. Right: Ghost in the cinematic universe.
"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."
— Christopher Lee on his role in The Wicker Man (1973) being recast in the 2006 remake

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.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Bomberman B-Daman Bakugaiden, loosely based on the Bomberman game series, included a female Akabon (Red Bomber) rather than the male Akabon from the videogames.
  • Bungou Stray Dogs has Kyoka Izumi and Kouyou Ozaki, two historical male writers, gender flipped as females in the series.
  • The Battle Lovers and Maximum Gorar from Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE! are basically Magical Boy Warriors and Caerula Adamas and the VEPPer are basically Dark Magical Boys...until their respective Heel-Face Turns, that is.
  • Unlike most of the Universe 6 counterparts in Dragon Ball Super, Caulifla and Kale serves as this to Goku and Broly respectively. Their relationship, however, is far friendly compared to the latter.
  • The manhwa Evyione Ocean Fantasy is a gender-flipped version of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid".
  • Since Fairy Tail has a parallel world where they manage to make use of this without any adaptions. The Hughes they fought in the parallel world was a guy, but the one who they later meet in their own world is female. A more traditional variant happens later on when the 13th constellation Orphiuchus the Serpent-Barer appears during one of the later arcs it is very clearly a female, despite the constellation being male.
    • For that matter, Aries of the ram constellation has always strangely been female.
  • In From the New World, Maria and Mamoru's child is a boy in the original novel but a girl in the anime.
  • The 2001 anime adaptation of Fruits Basket accidentally did this to Akito, the Big Bad of the series, as it almost Overtook the Manga and thus made several changes to the plot in order to give it a satisfying ending. Late in the manga, Akito is revealed to actually be female, having been Raised as the Opposite Gender due to her mother Ren's petty jealousy. The 2001 anime is only based on the first seven volumes of the manga and was released before this revelation; as a result, Akito is depicted as male, having a male voice and being shown with a completely flat chest in the final episode.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Full Metal Panic! is a Gender Flip of an Action Girlfriend series: Kaname Chidori takes the place of the not-so-ordinary Audience Surrogate and eventual Action Survivor, while Sousuke serves as the attractive and highly skilled but extremely socially inept bodyguard/love interest that enters her life and changes it forever.
  • A variant shows up in Gargoyle of the Yoshinagas. When Gargoyle is transported to a mountain village, he meets a pair of siblings who resemble Futaba and Kazumi almost exactly. Since Futaba is a tomboy and Kazumi is very feminine, the gender flipped pair are more normal than their counterparts.
  • In-universe example in Gate. Shandy Gaff Marea writes a report on the heroes, but for some reason turned Tuka into a man.
  • Getter Robo:
    • In the OVA Armageddon, Tag Along Kid Genki from the original series is reimagined as a girl and given the new name Kei Kuruma (as she was adopted by Benkei Kuruma after losing her father and older sister). She's also a pilot and one of the main characters thanks to a Time Skip.
    • New Getter Robo does this again, but this time, to Raikou Minamoto. And by the way, she predates Fate/Grand Order's Mama Raikou!
  • Gintama: Kijima Matako and Imai Nobume are women, but their original historical counterparts Kijima Matabei and Imai Noburou respectively are male. This also applies to regular character Kyuubei, whose entire gimmick is that she was Raised as the Opposite Gender (ending up similar to the gender of her historical counterpart Juubei), and an arc that has her changing to match that counterpart genderbends everyone else along with her.
  • Gundam has the very strange and short-lived manga Gunnota no Onna, which is about a female Char Aznable working as an Office Lady while trying to hide her being a Gundam Otaku. While most of the cast is Gender Flipped Universal Century characters, a few remain intact, like Gunnota's best friend Flay and a Continuity Cameo by three familiar-looking children.
  • Gundam Build Fighters has a Running Mythology Gag where famous characters from across the franchise's history will appear in brief Continuity Cameo roles. Heero Yuy appears in Episode 14, but as a teenage girl rather than a dude.
  • Guyver: Out of Control changes the wearer of the Guyver II armor from a male inspector named Oswald A. Lisker to a female inspector named Valcuria.
  • In what can be considered a Memetic Mutation outbreak, gender-flipped versions of the cast of Haruhi Suzumiya took the internet by storm, with Kyonko at the center of it all. There are even ongoing fan projects to completely Gender Flip the light novels.
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers: Himaruya updated his blog with more gender flips. Including Taiwan, who goes from a Genki Girl to a cute little boy with a flowery jacket pin.
  • The 2009 TV special of Kimba the White Lion has Pauly Crakcer/Cocco being female rather than male in the original anime/manga.
  • The main cast of Kaguya-sama: Love Is War are based off of Kaguya-hime and her five suitors in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter.note  All of the original suitors were male, but two of them in the manga (Kuramochi no Miko and Ishidzukuri no Miko) are female (Fujiwara and Iino respectively). Also, the Official Doujinshi Spin-Off had a chapter where all the male characters were female, with Kaguya and Shirogane's Duel of Seduction being reimagined as a Pseudo-Romantic Friendship.
  • Komi Can't Communicate:
    • An in-universe example is when the play the students put on for the culture festival is initially about a cold-blooded princess (Komi) who falls in love with a delivery boy (Tadano). When Komi goes to comfort a distraught Manbagi and doesn't manage to get back in time for the next showing, the students change the play to one about a cold-blooded prince (Katai) who falls in love with a kitchen maid (a cross-dressing Tadano).
    • Out-universe, according to this video interview the author says Komi was originally conceived as a guy, but Oda changed it because of the editor requesting that the idea could work better if the main character was a girl. So, Komi is essentially a gender flip character.
  • Lupin III:
    • The second Lupin III manga gave Inspector Zenigata a partner called Melon Cop. The 1977 anime featured an episode that loosely adapted Melon Cop's first appearance, but with the character changed to a female investigator from France named Melon Ganimard, a.k.a. Detective Melon.
    • The fourth episode of Part 6 is a Whole-Plot Reference to Ernest Hemingway's The Killers, but with the diner employee who spends the story chatting with the hitmen (as well as the real server she tied up, gagged and replaced) being a woman instead of a man.
  • Magical Girl Ore flips the Super Gender-Bender flavor of Magical Girl Warrior: the cute girls in frills are the starting point, while the tough, masculine beefcakes are the transformations.
  • In Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers, Death Adder from the Serpent Society is a woman. Death Adder is traditionally depicted as a male in the Captain America comics.
  • Mazinger Angels is a gender-swapped version from the Mazinger universe: takes the worlds of Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer, replaces the male main characters and their manly Humongous Mecha with the female leads and their Fem Bots and you have this series.
  • The manga adaptation of Mega Man 6 flips Centaur Man into being a disguised female Robot Master.
  • Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid depicts the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl as a large breasted woman.
  • An in-universe example in Monthly Girls' Nozaki-kun: Nozaki is prone to this when taking inspiration from people he knows - Mikoshiba, Wakamatsu, Hori and Seo all inspire gender-flipped characters. This can also be invoked by the manga itself as many of the male characters have personality traits more commonly associated with female characters, and vice versa. For instance, Mikorin is basically a blushing male Tsundere, while Kashima is a female Handsome Lech, Chick Magnet and Charmer.
  • My-HiME has a bit of this. Tate Yuuichi, the only masculine male protagonist in the show, is constantly frustrated by the fact that he's completely helpless compared to all the Magical Girls despite his (rusty) kendo skills (which would make him a Badass Normal in other shows), and even gets told so to his face when he finally figures out the Masquerade.
  • The original Namu Amida Butsu! -UTENA- game changes Ashuku Nyorai into a female, but its anime adaptation changes her back into male, though a crossdressing one.
  • Ōoku: The Inner Chambers does this to Shogunate Japan from the reign of Iemitsu on, with three exceptions: the original Shogun Iemitsu, who died young and is replaced by his daughter, who takes on his name and reign, The 47 Ronin, who (mostly) stay all male, and Shogun Ienari, becoming the first male shogun in decades.
  • Osomatsu-san likes to do this because only three of its usual main cast (Matsuyo, Totoko and Nyaa) are female. In the second cour of the first season and the first cour of the second, there were the "Girlymatsu-sans" who resemble the Sextuplets but are female, with a job, and not related. By the second cour of the second season, new characters (often female) are assembled out of the Sextuplets to better suit the one-off stories' needs.
  • One episode of Oreimo sees Kirino's novel getting adapted into an anime series. The writers of the TV show propose changing the heroine into a boy in order to better entice young male viewers.
  • Pokémon: The Series: Kinda. In the games, Iris had only a female Fraxure and a female Haxorus, but in the anime, she has a male Axew instead. After Axew's final evolution into Haxorus and having taken the role of Iris's Ace Pokémon, this Haxorus is effectively a male version of his game counterpart.
  • Princess Princess had "Prince Prince". Two girls from that story argued over the existence (or not) of differences resulting from the gender flip.
  • The josei manga Private Prince is a complete gender flip of the Well, Excuse Me, Princess! trope: here we have a prince and a commoner girl falling victim to Belligerent Sexual Tension.
  • Saint Seiya:
  • Koan's first appearance in the Sailor Moon manga had her kill a little girl who saw her and her droids at night. In Sailor Moon Crystal, the unfortunate witness Koan murders in this scene was changed to an adult businessman.
  • The second anime adaptation of Hector Malot's novel Sans Famille does this to the main character.
  • The cast of School Rumble staged a gender-flipped version of "Sleeping Beauty".
  • In The Seven Deadly Sins, which takes cues from Arthurian Legend, Merlin is a young looking woman that wears very revealing clothes.
  • In Seven Mortal Sins, all the angel and devil characters like Lucifer and Michael are female.
  • A manga called Shiroi Majo was released in 2014 which features Simo Häyhä in the middle of the Winter War in 1939. Just one slight difference from reality: "Simo Häyhä" is a teenage girl who looks outrageously similar to Sinon.
  • Space Battleship Yamato 2199 has Akira "Rei" Yamamoto, who was originally a male pilot with a relatively small role in the original, becoming a female pilot with a much larger one.
  • Downplayed in the Splatoon manga whenever adapting the games' storylines. While the genders of these characters can be customized in the games, promotional materials always have the protagonist roles filled by females, with each having a canoncial appearence. In contrast, the manga uses Goggles, Rider, and Gloves as Decomposite Characters of both Agent 3 and Agent 4, while the Octo Expansion story arc features a male Agent 8.
  • Strike Witches, which features gender flipped versions of real life WWII Ace Pilots.
  • Tekken Comic portrays Leo as a teenage boy, as it was written before Katsuhiro Harada had revealed that she's actually a Bifauxnen (with "Leo" being short for "Eleonora").
  • Hanako from Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun is a male version of Hanako-san, a well-known Japanese urban legend who's typically portrayed as a young girl.
  • In the 1987 anime The Three Musketeers, Aramis is a woman who disguised herself as a man to join the Musketeers. In the original novel, all the musketeers are men.
  • In Ulysses: Jeanne d'Arc and the Alchemist Knights, Arthur de Richemont, Philip of Burgundy, La Hire and Charlotte de Valois are all gender flips of historical characters from The Hundred Years War. Considering it is from the same author as The Ambition of Oda Nobuna above, is no surprise.
  • Chapter 109 of UQ Holder! revealed that Karin is actually a female version of Judas Iscariot.
  • The cast of Wandering Son played gender-flipped versions of The Rose of Versailles and Romeo and Juliet in school plays.
  • Shōnen Magazine has a special chapter spun off of Yamada-kun and the Seven Witches, titled Yamada-san to Nananin no Majo. All characters keep their surnames, with their given names femininized or masculinized. The cast consists of Orara (Urara), Ryuuko (Ryuu), Mikado (Miyabi), Torami (Toranosuke), Haruno (Haruma), Meme (Nene), Shiori (Ushio), Makoto (Mikoto). Diagetically, though, none of this actually happens because it's fanfic manga by Meiko Otsuka.

    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.
  • In Marvel's all-ages Marvel Adventures 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.
  • Tristan in Camelot 3000 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.
  • 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.
  • In the original Bronze Age continuity (and, apparently, in the "Post-Zero Hour" continuity), the Legion of Super-Heroes' Science Police liaison Shvaughn Erin was a woman. The "Five Years Later" continuity retconned her into being a transgender person named Sean Erin, who stopped using Pro-Fem when he realised Element Lad was actually gay.
  • 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.
  • There have been girl versions of Batman's sidekick, Robin:
    • In Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, a young girl becomes the new Robin. News reports about Batman's new sidekick don't know any better, and continue to call his assistant "Boy Wonder".
    • Stephanie Brown became Robin when Tim Drake retired for a short time.
    • In the above-mentioned Earth 2 series, Robin was Helena Wayne, Bruce's teenage daughter.
  • 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.◊ 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.
  • 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.
  • Detective Comics (Rebirth) reveals Jeremiah Arkham has a daughter named Astrid, who's become a costumed villain targeting Batman. What puts her here? Her costumed identity is a combination of this, Decomposite Character, and Samus Is a Girl, as she takes up an identity held by an alternate version of Jason Todd: the Arkham Knight.
  • 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.

    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.
  • "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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Spider-Ninja takes place not only in a part of the Spiderverse where the TMNT exist, but where Peter Parker was born a girl (known as Petra Parker-Hamato).
  • 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.
  • 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: Ravage is male in all iterations of Transformers canon he appears in. The fic's version refers to Ravage as "her" upon being sent into battle.

    Films — Animation 
  • Mr. Tarantula/Legs from The Bad Guys becomes Ms. Tarantula/Webs in the movie.
  • Ms. Li from Batman: Under the Red Hood is a female version of Mr. Li, a similar character from the original Under The Hood comic story.
  • The Halloween Tree, an animated film adapted from a book of the same title written by Ray Bradbury, changed the trick-or-treater dressed as a witch from a boy named Henry-Hank to a girl named Jenny.
  • The crocodile who wants to eat Captain Hook in Peter Pan is female in the book. In the Disney adaptation, the crocodile (known as Tick-Tock) is male.
  • The version of Doctor Octopus seen in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is a female scientist named Olivia "Liv" Octavius.
  • Terk (whose name is short for Terkina) from Tarzan is (loosely) based on Terkoz from the original novels, who was male. Apparently, this was a result of Rosie O'Donnell's audition.
  • In Treasure Planet, Captain Smollett from Treasure Island is a feline lady alien named Amelia.
  • In The True Meaning of Smekday Pig the cat was a girl, in Home (2015) Pig is a boy cat, which is strange because real life calico cats are almost always female due to the genetics of coloring.
  • UglyDolls:
    • The movie makes the character Wage female, with the character being male in the original toyline.
    • Wedgehead is another character turned female from the toyline. Unlike Wage, Wedgehead gets a design change, being turned bright yellow instead of the toyline's original dark blue.
    • Ice-Bat is also turned into a female character, a fact revealed from her bio on Hasbro's character website.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In the film adaptation of the comic Alena Fabian becomes Fabienne.
  • Warrant Officer Ripley from the first film in the Alien franchise. It's a telling point in the Sliding Scale of Gender Inequality that the first iconic badass Action Girl role was actually originally written as a man.
  • All the Troubles of the World: Corrections officer Ali Othrnan is changed to a female character and renamed Barbara Hammond.
  • Dr. Kafka, the Ravencroft Institute's Mad Scientist in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, played by Marton Csokas, is a gender-flip (and Adaptational Villainy) version of Dr. Ashley Kafka, the Awesome Shrink who founded the Institute in the comics.
  • Dr. Peter Leavitt is changed into Dr. Ruth Leavitt in the film adaptation of The Andromeda Strain.
  • Sandy the dog, (a male in the previous adaptations of Annie as well as in Little Orphan Annie), is a female in Annie (2014).
  • The 2020 Artemis Fowl movie turns the books' Commander Julius Root female, played by Dame Judi Dench, no less.
  • In the Russell Brand remake of Arthur (2011), Hobson the butler, played by Sir John Gielgud in the original, becomes Lillian Hobson the nanny, played by Dame Helen Mirren. In addition, Arthur's mother takes the role his father had in the original.
  • The famous duet "Baby, It's Cold Outside" used in films:
    • 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 1967 version of Bedazzled starred Peter Cook as the Devil. The 2000 remake cast Elizabeth Hurley in that role.
  • Burglar gender flipped several of the main characters, as well as giving a Race Lift to the protagonist. The movie was based on a series of novels by Lawrence Block about a white male bookstore owner/burglar. The screenplay was written after Bruce Willis passed on the role and it became a vehicle for Whoopi Goldberg.
  • Critics pointed out that much of Byzantium is basically a gender-flipped take on Jordan's earlier film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire.
  • In the low-budget 1990 Captain America movie, Professor Erskine is reimagined as a female scientist named Maria Vaselli.
  • There are far too many adaptations of A Christmas Carol with Ebenezer Scrooge replaced by a female with a similar backstory and attitude (but not necessarily the same age and attractiveness).
  • Jaq the mouse from Cinderella becomes Jacqueline in Cinderella (2015).
  • The Jerry Lewis movie Cinderfella, as the title implies, is a Gender Flip of Cinderella, with a male Cinderella (played by Lewis, of course), a Princess Charming, a fairy godfather played by Ed Wynn, and two stepbrothers (although the Wicked Stepmother remains female).
  • Cocaine Bear: The bear in the movie is female, while the real bear was male.
  • Color Out of Space (2020) changes the Gardners' middle son from the original short story into a daughter, Lavinia.
  • A 1990s adaptation of Mickey Spillane's Come Die With Me made Mike Hammer's cop buddy Lt. Pat Chambers into Patricia Chambers.
    • The Human Popsicle Expy of 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.
  • In the American remake of Les Diaboliques, the male detective Finchet became Shirley Vogel, portrayed by Kathy Bates.
  • With its virtually identical Clear My Name plotline, one could consider the Ashley Judd vehicle Double Jeopardy to be a Gender Flip of The Fugitive. Both movies even feature Tommy Lee Jones as a lawman who first hunts for, then aids, the fugitive. We even get a misleading 911 call made by the victim though as the audience soon learns, this was deliberately done in order to ensure that the woman would be convicted, as well as the protagonist wailing, "I didn't kill my husband!", similar to Richard Kimble. Indeed, not only was the movie referred to as The Female Fugitive by several critics, people genuinely needed to be informed that it was NOT another sequel.
  • In the live-action adaptation of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game, the male character of Major Anderson is played by Viola Davis. Interestingly, they were originally going to have Graff played by a woman (an idea that met with Card's approval), but then Harrison Ford got the part, so they gender flipped Anderson instead.
  • Enola Holmes 2 applies this to Moriarty, who is in the film portrayed as a black woman played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster.
  • In "Let the Right One In" the vampire Eli despite being assumed to be female was actually a boy who was castrated as a child. In the American adaption "Let Me In" the vampire Abby is definitely female, there's even a deleted scene which shows Abby a female when she was turned.
  • Evil Dead
    • Conversely, Bruce Campbell in The Evil Dead (1981) plays what is essentially the Final Girl of the horror movie. It wasn't planned that way, however. The order in which characters died was actually determined by actor availability. If an actor left early in the shoot, his or her character also died early in the movie. Apparently Campbell was the one without a life, though that seems to have worked to his benefit in the long run.
    • In the remake /Stealth Sequel, Ash's role is filled by an Expy named Mia.
  • This was done in both adaptations of the Hercule Poirot story Evil Under the Sun by Agatha Christie:
    • In the 1982 version, Emily Brewster becomes the flamboyant and effeminate Rex Brewster.
    • In the 2001 version, the victim's teenaged stepdaughter Linda turns into a stepson Lionel.
  • The film Eye in the Sky's protagonist Colonel Powell was originally written to be a male. It was changed to a female, played by Helen Mirren.
  • Fright Night 2: New Blood is supposedly a sequel to the 2011 remake of the 1985 movie, but it's really just another remake with Jerry (renamed Gerri) as a female vampire. Oh, and it's set in Romania instead of the United States.
  • In the original Ghostbusters (1984), the eponymous ghost-hunting team is made up of four men with a female secretary. In the 2016 remake, the team is all-female and their secretary is a man.
  • The plot of Grease 2 is basically a flip of the first movie's plot. The guy is now the naïve, sweet one and the girl is the tough, experienced gang member.
  • In the Harry Potter books, every player on the Slytherin Quidditch team either has a male first name or is referred to only by their surname. In the first film, however, their Keeper (Miles Bletchley in the book) is replaced by a girl.
  • Zig-zagged with Hellraiser (2022). This film's version of Pinhead, the Priest, is portrayed by a woman for the first time, which flips the precedent for the films but is more accurate to The Hellbound Heart, as in the novella "Pinhead" was an ambiguously-gendered Cenobite whose only clue to their gender was a feminine voice.
  • Double subverted in the short film High and Tight where the third Olsen sibling was first a boy called Seth - then changed to a girl called Serena. Then when the original actress dropped out and no replacements could be found in time, the character became a boy again.
  • Head Over Heels (2001) is a gender-flipped romantic comedy version of Rear Window.
  • The Howard Hawks classic newspaper comedy His Girl Friday is a gender-flipped version of the play The Front Page (which had already been made into an acclaimed movie once before). Hawks turned the "Hildy Johnson" character into a woman and made it a romantic comedy. Billy Wilder later remade it yet again with two male protagonists, and then an '80s remake called Switching Channels - set this time in the television news industry - put the romance aspect back.
  • In a What Could Have Been example, when Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly was offered the chance to helm a film adaptation of Louis Sachar's Holes, his screenplay for the movie changed the female warden of Camp Green Lake (real name Lou Walker) to an unnamed man—among many, many other changes that left the story almost unrecognizable.
  • The Made-for-TV Movie How to Marry a Billionaire is a Setting Update of How to Marry a Millionaire, except it's about three men looking for rich wives.
  • The Jem and the Holograms (2015) movie sees Eric Raymond from Jem turned into a woman (Erica). She's also Rio's mother.
  • In both Disney's 2016 live action adaptation of The Jungle Book (1967) and Warner Bros' 2018 live action adaptation of same, the giant snake Kaa is now a female. The major difference being that she's a villain in the 2016 work, a hero in the 2018 one.
  • The film adaptation of Jurassic Park switched the roles of Hammond's grandchildren, making Lex (the girl) the older one and the computer genius. This was done in order to give Lex more characterization. In the original novel Tim was a Teen Genius that was both computer savvy and obsessed with dinosaurs, while Lex was just annoying.
  • Gazelle was a man in The Secret Service, but a woman in Kingsman: The Secret Service.
  • In the film adaptation of K-PAX, the novels' Dr. Klaus Villars — a white, bearded, German-accented, classically Freud-reminiscent psychiatrist — becomes Dr. Claudia Villars, a female Black-American played by Alfre Woodard.
  • Jungle Cruise features a female version of the ride's shrunken head salesman Trader Sam as the native tribe's chieftain, briefly donning a tophat much like the Walt Disney World version of the character.
  • Lantana, based on Speaking in Tongues, turns Valerie's patient Sarah Phelan into a gay male patient, Patrick Phelan.
  • Legend of Eight Samurai has one of the eight half-brothers changed from a crossdressing male to a female portrayed by Sue Shiomi.
  • Kenneth Branagh's 2000 film adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost changed Holofernes into Holofernia, played by Geraldine McEwan.
  • The Patrick Dempsey film Made of Honor is clearly this of the Julia Roberts vehicle My Best Friend's Wedding, given their identical plots—person realizes that they're in love with their opposite-sex best friend just as said friend announces their engagement, is roped into being part of the bridal party and spends the ensuing time pulling numerous manipulative stunts to break up the relationship. In true Double Standard style, Julia Roberts character, a woman, is blasted for her behavior and does NOT get the guy, whereas Patrick Dempsey ends up married to the girl.
  • In Maleficent Since Diaval becomes the iconic dragon, and not Maleficent, this would mean the dragon of this continuity is male.
  • The original ABBA recording of "Does Your Mother Know?" was an older man singing to a barely (or possibly not quite) legal girl, whereas in Mamma Mia! it's flipped to a middle-aged woman singing to the very persistent and very young man who's pursuing her.
  • In place of Jimmy Olsen at the Daily Planet is a young woman named Jenny in Man of Steel. However Jenny's last name is confirmed NOT to be Olsen, so there is room for a red headed male photographer in the sequel. If you pay attention, the movie shows her last name to be "Jurwich"... but one tie-in book makes it Olsen, so it's hard to say for sure.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • In Avengers: Age of Ultron, Hawkeye's youngest child (adapted from the second volume of The Ultimates) is changed from a girl named Nicole to a boy named Nathaniel (after his "Auntie Nat". Lampshaded in-universe, as they mention that they were expecting a girl. His middle child is also changed from a boy named Lewis to a girl named Lila. The oldest child is not flipped, although he does get a name change from Callum to Cooper.
    • In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Mainframe is a female android voiced by Miley Cyrus, despite being a male, futuristic counterpart of The Vision.
    • In Ant-Man and the Wasp, Ghost goes from being a white man to a biracial woman.
    • Captain Marvel:
      • Captain Mar-Vell is a woman, played by Annette Bening. The character's human alter ego is consequently changed from "Walter Lawson" to "Wendy Lawson."
      • Complicated example with the Kree Supreme Intelligence. In the comics, the Supreme Intelligence is basically a giant floating head, but has nonetheless often been referred to with male pronouns (or none at all), and has always been voiced by male actors whenever it showed up in TV shows and video games. In the film, however, the Supreme Intelligence takes on a form unique to whoever it is talking to, meaning that when it appears onscreen to commune with Carol Danvers, it looks like the aforementioned Mar-Vell and is once again played by Bening.
    • In Eternals, the characters Makkari, Ajak and Sprite, all of whom are men in the original comics, are played by women. The three of them were brought Back from the Dead in the comics as woman to match their portrayals here.
    • In Black Widow (2021), Taskmaster turns out to be a woman, with the character's real name changed from Anthony Masters to Antonia Dreykov.
    • Cosmo the Spacedog is male in the comics, but her first speaking role in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special has her female. According to James Gunn, this was to make her more like the character's real-life inspiration Laika.
  • Vanessa Redgrave's role in Mission: Impossible was originally written for a man.
  • Jacob Portman's male psychiatrist Dr. Golan from Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children is played by actress Allison Janney in the film adaptation, subverted in that like in the book Dr. Golan turns out to be the false identity of a male Wight.
  • In the Joss Whedon film of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, one of the villain's lackeys, named Conrad, is female. The part has always been, in the past, a basic male role.
  • In Muppet Treasure Island, Ben Gunn from Treasure Island is changed to Benjamina Gunn just so Miss Piggy can have a role to play.
  • The remake of Overboard gender flips the two main characters from the original movie.
  • The character Carin from Patch Adams is a female medical student who Patch has a romantic relationship with, was molested as a child and is eventually killed by a mentally ill patient. In reality, "she" was Hunter Adams' best male friend, who he did not have a romantic relationship with, and while he was killed under similar circumstances, it was much earlier than the film depicts. This was one of the many reasons the Real Life Hunter Adams has openly criticised the movie based on his life.
  • Ran is a partial Gender Flip of King Lear, changing the gender of the daughters and Edmund.
  • The film adaptation of The Relic saw Linda Hunt play the museum director Anne Cuthbert, a character who, in the original novel, was a man named Ian Cuthbert.
  • Nearly every adaptation of The Ring changes the male protagonist into a female, and his baby daughter into a kid son. The only adaptation to keep the protagonist male is an obscure 1995 Japanese Made-for-TV Movie called Ring: Kanzenban.
  • RoboCop (2014) sees Anne Lewis changed into an African-American man named Jack Lewis. Conversely, Chief Dean is a female version of Sgt. Reed.
  • Most shadowcasts of The Rocky Horror Picture Show will let anyone, regardless of gender, audition for any part. ("Genderfuck" versions specifically gender flip all the roles.)
  • Rough Night is the same premise as Very Bad Things with the genders reversed.
  • The title character of Salt was originally named Edward and played by Tom Cruise, but he dropped out. When Angelina Jolie stepped in, the writers changed Ed to Evelyn and also decided to make Salt's spouse less of a Damsel in Distress.
  • The film version of Sgt. Bilko turned Cpl Rocky Barbella into Cpl Raquelle Barbella. (Bilko's other sidekick, Cpl Henshaw, was given a Race Lift).
  • The movie adaptation of Silent Hill replaced Harry Mason with Rose Dasilva. The idea was to play up the notion that a mother is even more attached to her child than a father, particularly if the child is a girl. Interestingly, the father was played by Sean Bean, who does look a bit like Harry Mason. In the sequel, Bean's character has taken the name Harry Mason, but still isn't the protagonist.
  • In Sodom and Gomorrah, King Bera of Sodom from the Book of Genesis becomes Queen Bera of Sodom.
  • Spotted in Son Of Man, an adaptation of the story of Jesus Christ that takes place in modern Africa. Several of the disciples are portrayed by women, with feminized versions of their original names to match.
  • The character of Dizzy Flores in Starship Troopers was a man in the original Robert A. Heinlein novel. In the movie, he was switched to a she, given a much bigger role, and played by Dina Meyers. Roughnecks: Starship Troopers Chronicles followed the movie's lead. note 
  • The 1996 made-for-TV movie, The Stepford Husbands is, as its name suggests, The Stepford Wives with the gender roles reversed-this time it's the women seeking to make their husbands "perfect".
  • The original screenplay for Streets of Fire had the role of McCoy, the hero's old army buddy, written as a male. Actress Amy Madigan, while auditioning for a different role, convinced the filmmakers to let her play McCoy as a tough, strong woman instead, without rewriting the part.
  • The Suicide Squad makes the Ratcatcher, a middle-aged male in the comics, into a teenage girl. Downplayed in that the character is named Ratcatcher 2, implying she's the original male Ratcatcher's Canon Foreigner successor.
  • In The Survivor, Hobbs (played by Jenny Agutter) was a man in James Herbert's original novel.
  • The female lead of the 1982 Swamp Thing movie is a government agent named Alice Cable, based on Agent Matthew Cable from the original comics.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014), April's boss Burne Thompson is now an African-American woman named Bernadette Thompson, played by Whoopi Goldberg.
  • In The Tempest (2010) directed by Julie Taymor, the character Prospero is changed to Prospera and played by Helen Mirren.
  • Twilight Zone: The Movie: In "Kick the Can", the Sunnyvale Retirement Home administrator is Miss Cox. In the original episode, it is Mr. Cox.
  • And it happened again during the production of Vantage Point (2008), where Sigourney Weaver played the also originally male TV producer Rex Brooks.
  • In Warcraft (2016), Alodi, who's male in the game the film's based on, is female (or at least female-appearing).
  • Wee Willie Winkie was based on a Rudyard Kipling short story in which the protagonist was a little boy. When the story was adapted for the screen, it became a Shirley Temple vehicle, and the main character became a girl.
  • In the original novel version of Winter's Bone, protagonist Ree had two younger brothers. In the film version, one of them is a girl.
  • In B-Movie series Witchcraft (possibly best known from Allison Pregler's reviews) a police officer named Lutz first appears as a man in the sixth film and is suddenly a woman in the seventh, with no explanation. The thirteenth and final film, in its valiant attempts to close all the series' Plot Holes, Ret Conned the two Lutzes into siblings.
  • The Hustle is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels with conwomen preying on men instead of conmen preying on women. The tagline "Giving Dirty Rotten Men a Run for Their Money" acknowledges this.
  • In The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Watson is a woman, played by actress Bessie Nellis.
  • Jessica Chastain's character in Dark Phoenix is Vuk, a very obscure male alien who showed up back in The Avengers #4 during The '60s. However, as Vuk's form was stolen from a human woman she murdered, her original alien gender is unknown.
  • In the 2019 film adaptation of Cats, Old Deuteronomy (who is male in the musical and the source material) is played by actress Judi Dench.
  • Lady and the Tramp (2019) changes Jock from male to female (her name becomes a nickname for Jacqueline), makes Jim Dear and Darling's baby a girl named Lulu instead of a boy, and changes the female Siamese cats into male Devon Rexes.
  • Rags is a gender flip of Cinderella, where Cinderella is now a boy named Charlie with a stepfather and stepbrothers, and the Prince is a female popstar named Kadee Worth.
  • Kiss of the Spider Woman: Molina was a transgender woman in the book, but is a cisgender man now.
  • Dolly Dearest: The film is basically a gender flip of Child's Play with a girl and a female doll.
  • The 2018 film The Adventures of Thomasina Sawyer is an adaptation of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in which ... well, the title says it all, really.
  • Dune (2021) reimagines Liet Kynes, a white man in the novel and the 1984 film (where he was played by Max von Sydow), as a Black woman played by Sharon Duncan-Brewster.
  • The 2022 remake of 'Salem's Lot has Dr. Cody, a man in the original novel and prior adaptations, played by Alfre Woodard.
  • In Left Behind: Rise Of The Antichrist, which is loosely based on the second half of the first Left Behind book, investigative reporter Eric Miller becomes Erica Miller working for GWN.

    Literature 
  • Aniara: The narrator is male in the poem, the 2018 film adaptation turned him into a lesbian woman.
  • 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.
  • 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.)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Trivigaunte, in The Book of the Long Sun, is essentially a parody of fundamentalist Islam, but with the genders reversed.
  • 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.
  • Marianne Wiggins' John Dollar, which reworks Lord of the Flies with a group of marooned girls.
  • 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.

  • In Time Scout, one of the theories floating around is that the Ripper Watch Team might be looking for Jill the Ripper.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Honor Harrington, in her role as Horatio Hornblower IN SPACE!!
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.)
  • Gender Swapped Greek Myths by Karrie Fransman and Jonathan Plackett is Exactly What It Says on the Tin, including Persea and Medeus, Arachnus the Weaver, Thesea and the Minoheifer, Pygmalia and Galateus, and Atalantus the Male Huntress.

    Live-Action TV 
  • 12 Monkeys, an adaptation of the 1995 movie, has Jeffrey Goines turn into Jennifer Goines.
  • In The Adventures of Shirley Holmes, Sherlock's descendant and Expy is his great-grandniece. And her archenemy is Molly Hardy.
  • In Arrow the African-American Posthumous Character Paula Holt becomes a white guy called Paul. Still married to Mr Terrific, though.
  • In the second series of The Avengers (1960s), Honor Blackman (as Dr. Cathy Gale) replaced Ian Hendry (Dr. David Keel) as John Steed's partner. In her earliest appearances (scripts written much earlier for Hendry), her dialogue was left completely unchanged. This is sometimes credited with making Cathy Gale a particularly memorable female character for the early '60s.
  • Battlestar Galactica remake:
    • Gender Flips Starbuck and Boomer (also a Race Lift) from the original. As often happens with actors who find themselves replaced, Dirk Benedict was less than happy about it, referring to his heir as "Stardoe" (har har). Kevin Smith joked about this when he hosted a Battlestar Galactica panel at Comic Con.
      Smith: [to Ron Moore and David Eick] I'm glad you guys changed Starbuck into a woman. Otherwise it would have made all those kissing scenes with Lee really awkward.
    • Lloyd Bridges' Commander Cain was also revived as Michelle Forbes' (now Admiral) Helena Cain. But they're both equally crazy.
  • Jonathan Cartwright/Mouse in Batwoman is a Gender Flip of Batman villain Jane Doe, who likewise impersonates people with flayed-skin masks, and was named as Jane Cartwright in Gotham.
  • The production of Swan Lake put on in The Big Leap uses genderblind casting. This coupled with several cast changes causes several roles to have this. Simon is Odile the Black Swan, Brittney is briefly Prince Siegfried, Aja is Von Rothbart by the final production, and the show makes a big deal out of casting two women as the Siegfried's parents (with a sound cue that bellows "two mommies" whenever it's brought up).
  • The Bionic Woman is a gender flipped reimagining of The Six Million Dollar Man, at least one episode of which was plot and dialogue identical. At the end, the titular hero has to provide an impromptu explanation of how his or her finger came to be cut. The explanation given in both cases was "I cut myself shaving".
  • In Black Lightning, Erica Moran is a gender-flipped version of Freight Train from The Outsiders, real name Eric Moran.
  • Servalan in Blake's 7 was originally a man and was originally supposed to appear once. Once Jacqueline Pearce entered the picture, that all changed.
  • The Boys (2019): Madelyn note  Stillwell and Grace note  Mallory. Season 2 has Stormfront played by a woman while "Vic the Veep" Neumann is reimagined into Victoria Neumann.
  • Brave New World: Mustapha Mond, the male World Controller in the book, is now female.
  • In the Japanese mini-series Chi no Wadachi, the investigator character is played by Tao Okamoto. The character was a man in the original novel.
  • In the Death Note live-action drama, Near, who is a boy in the manga, was played by a teenage girl and deliberately had their gender left ambiguous.
  • Doctor Who:
    • In "The Web Planet", the character Vrestin, leader of the Menoptera war party, was written as male (like all the other Menoptera). However, when casting the character, the cast and crew were impressed with the choreographer hired to create the 'insect movement' and cast her as Vrestin without changing anything in the script besides pronouns, resulting in one of the most powerful Action Girl supporting characters in 60s Who. Vrestin is male in the Target novelisation of the story (Doctor Who and the Zarbi), which is based on the original script.
    • In "Galaxy 4", the Drahvins were originally all male, until producer Verity Lambert suggested making them all-female.
    • Gia Kelly in "The Seeds of Death" was originally a man.
    • Morgan in "Colony in Space" was originally a woman, with Susan James cast in the role. However, she was replaced by Tony Caunter when the BBC's Head of Drama Serials made an unusual intervention and decided the role was inappropriate for a woman to perform. James was nevertheless paid in full.
    • The human president in "Frontier in Space" was originally a man.
    • Bettan in "Genesis of the Daleks" was originally a man. Aside from Sarah Jane Smith, she's the only female character in the story.
    • Marn in "The Sun Makers" was originally a man.
    • Dr. Solow and Preston in "Warriors of the Deep" were originally men, until director Pennant Roberts made them female. Roberts usually gender-flipped at least one role in every story he directed.
    • Averted in "The Twin Dilemma", as John Nathan-Turner was encouraged to cast two more experienced female actresses in the roles of the Creepy Twins, but chose male actors because he believed it was crucial the characters be boys for the script to work. He may have had a point about this (the twins can be read as a Plot Parallel for the Doctor's fragmented personality following his regeneration).
    • The stage play adaptation of "The Robots of Death" turns Uvanov, Borg, Cass and Dask into women. One would think that this was being done to obscure which character is secretly the pro-robotist terrorist Taren Capel, but the main characters refer to Taren as 'she' from the beginning. Another side effect of this is that it means the only surviving male character of the story is Poul (who exists as a gibbering vegetable).
    • Pope Benedict IX is portrayed as a woman in "Extremis". Considering the scandalous nature of his reign, this was probably much safer than portraying him accurately. It also doubles as a Shout-Out to the legend of Pope Joan. However, it's later revealed that nearly the entirety of the episode was part of a simulation.
  • In Doom Patrol (2019)
    • Cyborg's childhood friend Ron Evers is now his love interest Roni Evers.
    • The Brotherhood of Dada is now the Sisterhood of Dada, although in fact, only two members are examples: the Fog (whose real name is changed from Byron Shelley to Shelley Byron) and the Quiz (whose real name was never revealed in the comics). Sleepwalk was already a woman and Frenzy remains male, as is new member Malcolm.
  • In Dracula, Van Helsing is a man. In Dracula (2020), there are two Van Helsings, both female.
  • In another Sherlock Holmes adaptation, Elementary, John Watson has been changed to Joan Watson and is played by Lucy Liu. As Liu is Chinese American, this is a Race Lift as well. Also, Moriarty is now a woman and is combined with Irene.
  • One of the episodes of the new Fantasy Island featured a terminally ill woman who wanted to experience life as a soldier in a combat zone. Instead of being placed with a company of male soldiers like she expected, she was placed in a gender-reversed version of The Squad, which was filled with the requisite roughneck personality types, only with women playing the roles.
  • The Flash:
    • A crossover event between that show and Arrow introduced a Gender Flip of The Atom's enemy, the Bug-Eyed Bandit, with "Bertram Larvan" becoming "Brie Larvan" (portrayed by Emily Kinney).
    • Season 3 introduces the Top as a young woman, with the character's name changed from "Roscoe Dillon" to "Rosalind 'Rosa' Dillon" (portrayed by Ashley Rickards).
    • Season 4's "Luck Be A Lady", introduces Becky "Hazard" Sharp, who is female in both the series and the comics ... except the details of how her Winds of Destiny, Change! powers work are altered slightly to essentially make her a gender flip of Amos Fortune, specifically the way he's presented in Justice League Europe.
    • Season 4 also introduces the show's version of Black Bison, who is a woman named Mina Chayton instead of a man named John Ravenhair.
    • Also in Season 4 is a version of Fiddler, who instead of an elderly man named Isaac Bowen is a younger woman named Izzy Bowen.
    • And obscure Hawkman character Null, who's a woman named Janet Petty instead of a man named, well, Null, as far as we know.
    • Joss Jackam, the Weather Witch, is very loosely based on Weather Wizard's son in the comics, Josh Jackam.
    • Season 5 introduces Spin, who is changed from a man known only as Mr. Auerbach to a woman named Spencer Young.
    • Evan McCulloch, a.k.a Mirror Master II, is adapted as Eva McCulloch.
    • The Red Death is an alternate universe version of Bruce Wayne in the comics, but in the series, Red Death is instead an alternate incarnation of Ryan Wilder, the second Batwoman.
  • In the TV movie that inspired Forever Knight, the medical examiner and Secret-Keeper who'd met Nick when he woke up in the morgue had been male.
  • Fuller House flips the genders of its antecedent series. In the original, Danny Tanner (a man) raised three girls with help from his two pals (also men), in the new show, DJ Tanner (a woman) raises three boys with help from her two pals (women).
  • Game of Thrones:
    • For an unknown reason, the Dornish practise of open succession (i.e a firstborn girl inherits before her younger brother) was erased. This leads to some notable Dornish ladies who rule in their own right being changed into men. In particular, Oberyn refers to his father as being Prince of Dorne before him, when in actual fact his mother was the reigning Princess. And in the books, the head of the delegation Tyrion meets outside King's Landing is a woman. An HBO press release named Prince Trystane rather than Princess Arianne as the heir to Prince Doran Martell.
    • Bronn's betrothed Lollys is said to be a daughter of Lord Stokeworth rather than the elderly Lady Tanda Stokeworth of the novels.
    • House Cerwyn was actually headed by a woman at the point in the novels where they are introduced in the show, Jonelle Cerwyn, after the Boltons killed her father and brother. The TV version omitted Jonelle and kept her brother alive — actually part of a pattern of gender-swapping minor background vassals from female to male.
  • The Goldbergs depicts producer Adam Goldberg's life in The '80s, but with one major difference: in real life, he has two brothers, Barry and Eric. On the show, he has a brother Barry and a sister Erica.
    • This particular example gets an In-Universe inversion in "8-Bit Goldbergs". In Adam's computer game based on his family, Erica is replaced by a man named Eric and her boyfriend Geoff Schwartz becomes Eric's girlfriend Geoffina.
  • Good Omens (2019): Pollution is nonbinary, referred to in the narration as "they", and played by a woman. Beelzebub is a woman as well, as are the Archangels Michael and Uriel, and most notably God Herself (but she's just a voice).
  • Gotham changes Firefly from a white male named Garfield Lynns to a young Latina woman named Bridget Pike (played by Michelle Veintimilla).
  • A zig-zagged example takes place in Hallmark Hall of Fame's 2005 miniseries Hercules. In this adaptation, the Nemean Lion is a male animal, but it can turn into a beautiful woman in order to seduce their enemies into letting their guard down. Then again, the miniseries fuses this character with the Theban Sphynx, so the monster is probably female after all, only that its true form looks like a male lion.
  • Red Dragon's male reporter Freddie Lounds becomes the female reporter Fredricka Lounds in the TV adaptation Hannibal. In the same show, forensic psychiatrist Dr. Alan Bloom becomes Alana Bloom and is given some angsty UST with Will Graham.
  • The Hardy Boys: Biff Hooper, a teenage boy in the novels, is made into a teenage girl in the Hulu series.
  • The 2010 remake of Hawaii Five-0 makes Kono a woman (renamed Kona, but still nicknamed "Kono"). She's played by Grace Park, who was previously best known as the gender-flipped Boomer in Battlestar Galactica.
  • It Happened One Christmas (1977) is a TV-Movie Gender Flip of It's a Wonderful Life starring Marlo Thomas. Played completely straight.
  • High Fidelity: Rob, originally a man in the book, film and musical is made a woman for the series.
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022): Antoinette Brown (a woman) is based on Antoine (a man) from The Vampire Chronicles, a musician (although she's more precisely a singer) who becomes Lestat de Lioncourt's lover and is later turned into a vampire.
  • It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia spoofs the trope in "The Gang Beats Boggs: Ladies' Reboot", where Dee leads a delegation of the show's female characters in rehashing the concept of a previous Episode on a Plane. Artemis keeps complaining that the idea is lazy and suggesting that they do something new instead.
  • The Jungle Book: Mowgli's Story gender-bends Bagheera - and Bagheera alone - so that s/he's a female for the duration of a movie. This is probably so that Mowgli can have a mother-figure without adding in Mother Wolf, the she-wolf from the book, but it can be a little odd for a kid only familiar with the Disney version.
    • It's not the first time that Bagheera was a female. The Soviet series Adventures of Mowgli did the same. Due to how Bagheera has a feminine pronunciation in Russian.
  • Mrs. Lee from Kim's Convenience was a man named Mr. Lee in the original play.
  • In Krypton, the terrorist Jax-Ur is an attractive woman in her 40's instead of an old man.
  • Legend of the Seeker: In the books, everyone refers to the Creator as "he". Here, it's the opposite, and her (apparent) human avatar is a woman.
  • Let the Right One In: Eli in the novel is a castrated boy. Eleanor is a girl.
  • Lockwood & Co. (2023): Pamela Joplin was Albert Joplin in the book series, while Fairfax’s assistant Ellie was a big hulking male thug named Grebe.
  • In the 2018 Lost in Space reboot, Dr. Zachary Smith is now a woman played by Parker Posey. In a subversion, it actually turns out that "Dr. Smith" is a con woman who stole the identity of this continuity's Zachary Smith.
  • Lovecraft Country has a few examples, such as George and Hippolyta's son Horace becoming their daughter Dee, and Caleb Braithwaite becoming Christina Braithwaite.
  • Lucifer:
    • The angel Remiel is a white man in the comics, but is depicted as an Asian woman in the show.
    • Gabriel is also changed from a white male to an Ambiguously Brown woman.
  • In MacGyver (1985), the title character took his orders from Pete Thornton. In the reboot, this role is filled by Patricia Thornton until she's discovered to be a mole for the enemy, arrested, and replaced by Matty Webber.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Japanese series Miss Sherlock is an update of Sherlock Holmes set in modern day Tokyo. Sherlock becomes Sara "Sherlock" Futaba, while Watson becomes Wato Tachibana.
  • Missing (2012) (female secret agent searches for her kidnapped son) seems to be a gender-flipped TV version of Taken (male ex-secret agent searches for his kidnapped daughter).
  • In-universe example: In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Actor", there's a movie adaptation being made of the Steve Wagner case (in "Mr. Monk and the Astronaut"). In this movie, Monk is played by method actor David Ruskin (Stanley Tucci), Natalie is played by a blonde actress, and Captain Stottlemeyer is a cameo appearance by Peter Weller. As for Randy Disher, he was wholly expecting Brad Pitt to be portraying him in the movie. Instead, Randy is replaced with a gorgeous brunette actress who becomes a love interest for Captain Stottlemeyer. The real Stottlemeyer and Disher don't know this when they show up on the set to watch a rehearsal, leading to a very awkward moment when the actors lean in for a kiss.
    Captain Leland Stottlemeyer: That never happened.
    Lt. Randall Disher: Not even once.
  • Monkey, an adaptation of Journey to the West, changed the gender of certain characters: Tripitaka is now a woman, Buddha is a goddess and Guanyin a god.
  • The BBC's 2012 Setting Update of Nicholas Nickleby has Nick working at a Bleak Abyss Retirement Home called Dotheolds Hall, in place of the Boarding School of Horrors Dotheboys Hall. Smike, the "simple" boy Nicholas befriends and rescues from the place, becomes a senile old lady named Mrs. Smike.
  • In The Nightmare Room episode "My Name Is Evil", the protagonist is male when she was female in the original story. The protagonist's peers were similarly gender flipped.
  • Once Upon a Time changes Jack the Giant Killer to Jacqueline the Giant Killer.
  • In One Piece (2023), Sham, one of Kuro's minions, in a woman, while her manga counterpart is a man.
  • The Outer Limits (1963): In "I, Robot", Dr. Charles Link's closest living relative is his niece Nina. In the 1939 short story "The Trial of Adam Link, Robot" by Eando Binder on which it is based, his closest relative is his nephew Tom.
  • Part of Me: In both El cuerpo del deseo and En cuerpo ajeno, it was an older man who inhabited the body of a younger man; here, it's an older woman inhabiting the body of a younger woman.
  • Power Rangers: The fullest effects of this trope are best seen in the seasons that are actual adaptations of the source shows including character portrayals, though for some instances, this trope applies only in combat when the Ranger adaptation would only use fight footage rather than adapting episode plots.
    • When Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger was "remade" into Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, the male Tiger Ranger became the female Yellow Ranger in order to have two female Rangers instead of just one. This practice started a trend for Yellow Rangers when four later Super Sentai shows were adapted into Power Rangers seasons: the male Yellow Rangers from Gingaman, Gogo-V, Timeranger and Gaoranger were turned into females in their corresponding adaptations (Lost Galaxy, Lightspeed Rescue, Time Force, and Wild Force). This practice would cause inconsistencies between the imported Japanese footage and the locally-filmed new footage, in which the Yellow Ranger would switch from having a masculine figure in one scene to having a feminine one in the next.
    • Tsuruhime, the Ninja Sentai Kakuranger White Ranger, underwent heavy Decomposite Character treatment. Of the three characters to take on her roles, two (Alien Ranger Delphine and MMPR Katherine) were still women, while her role as team leader and one of her Zords went to the male Tommy Oliver.
    • Katie from Power Rangers Time Force was made similar to Domon from Timeranger, although many of the latter's traits were given to Lucas and Trip. From what was left, Domon's nostalgia for sumo wrestling competitions got adapted as Katie missing her family, a much more emotional and feminine intake on the feeling; similarly, the subplot with Domon's relationship with a female photographer who discovered his identity was changed to a one-off deal between Katie and a male photographer who unmasked her that didn't go anywhere, due to males pursuing relationships being less common (and to make room for focus on the Rangers who wore any shade of red).
    • Taylor from Power Rangers Wild Force, on the other hand, was almost identical to Gaku from Gaoranger in terms of background and plot, the only major differences being personality (Taylor was a bold Defrosting Ice Queen, Gaku was friendly from the very beginning and somewhat quirky) and rank (Taylor was a lieutenant, whereas Gaku was a soldier). As a female Lancer was proven successful the previous season, Taylor got a better end of the stick than her yellow predecessor, who was The Big Guy and therefore more expendable.
  • Queen of Swords was pretty much a straight Gender Flip of Zorro, to the point that Sony sued over its resemblance to the character and its 1998 The Mask of Zorro film.note 
  • The crew of the Red Dwarf meet the Gender Flipped versions of themselves in a parallel universe. Although, not all of them were flipped. The Cat, the ultimate narcissist, is looking forward to meeting the feminine version of himself for... obvious reasons. However, his opposite number is a male Dog with zero dress sense.
    • Eventually, when Norman Lovett, who played Holly, left, they just hired Hattie Hayridge, who played his Gender Flip Hilly and said that Holly got a sex change to look like Hilly.
    • Captain Hollister is a man in the TV series, and a woman in the tie-in novels.
    • In the second pilot for the US version, the Cat was played by Terry Farrell (who would go on to be Jadzia in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) as a "feline warrior woman". (The original pilot had Hinton Battle playing the role much as Danny John-Jules did.) In the end, the American remake never aired anyway.
  • Revenge (2011), a modern day reimagining of The Count of Monte Cristo, gender-flips the protagonist Edmond Dantes to be Emily Thorne. Rather than having been framed herself like Edmond, Emily is the daughter of a man who was framed and falsely imprisoned.
  • In the anthology series The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, one episode adapts Robert Barr's "The Absent-Minded Coterie". The clever Mr. Macpherson becomes the equally clever Miss Mackail.
  • Djaq in Robin Hood is a Gender Flip of the Saracen outlaw seen in Robin of Sherwood (Nassir) and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (Azeem). ... And Robin Hood: Men in Tights (Achoo).
  • Lucky in The School Nurse Files was a boy in the original novel, but the director changed him into a girl for the series.
  • The American remake of the Australian show Secrets & Lies transforms lead investigator Ian Cornielle into Andrea Cornell.
  • Due to being unable to find suitable actresses, the Indian remake of Shake it Up rewrote the leads as boys.
  • Sherlock;
    • Watson's brother, "H. Watson", mentioned in "The Sign of Four", becomes John's sister, Harry (short for Harriet).
    • "The Hounds of Baskerville": Dr. James Mortimer becomes Dr. Louise Mortimer.
    • Laura Lyons becomes a young, male Corporal Lyons.
    • Stapleton is a trickier case; there's a Mr. Stapleton and Miss Stapleton in the book, but only one (female) Dr. Stapleton in the programme. The plot's been changed sufficiently that you can't tell which one she's meant to be by her actions.
    • The King of Bohemia becomes an unnamed female British royal in "A Scandal in Belgravia".
    • In John's Character Blog, Dr Barnicot from "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" becomes Sally Barnicot.
    • In the actual episode "The Six Thatchers", which probably makes the above blog post Canon Discontinuity, there is a brief reference to one of the busts belonging to a Miss Orrie Harker, counterpart to the original's Horace Harker.
    • In the same episode, DI Stella Hopkins is based on Inspector Stanley Hopkins, introduced in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange".
  • In the American version of Skins, most characters are transplanted from the British series except for the openly gay Maxxie. Maxxie becomes the lesbian Tea. The fact that they followed the same storyline with the character sleeping with Tony has several Unfortunate Implications.
  • In Star Trek: The Original Series, Gene Roddenberry sort of gender flipped the First Officer role, which was originally written as an emotionally distant, supremely rational Number Two (named "Number One"). NBC objected, however (not due to the casting of a female so much as the casting of the particular female, Majel Barrett, who happened to be Roddenberry's mistress at the time.) While different in several ways (most obviously, being an alien), Mr. Spock essentially assumed both her role as First Officer and her rationality and lack of emotion.
  • In Supergirl:
    • Dr. Emil Hamilton is changed to Dr. Amelia Hamilton.
    • N'or Cott was a male Martian in the comics, but is briefly mentioned in "Rebirth" with female pronouns.
  • In Superman & Lois, General Hardcastle from the 90s cartoon is a woman.
  • The CBS All Access adaptation of The Stand (2020) changed the Rat Man into the Rat Woman.
  • When a Revival of The Time Tunnel was attempted in 2002, male scientist Dr. Tony Newman was changed to female scientist Dr. Toni Newman.
  • The Umbrella Academy: In the comics, Vanya is a cis woman. In the show, Viktor comes out as a trans man in Season 3 due to Elliot Page's own gender transition.
  • In the books of The Vampire Diaries Elena had a 4-year-old sister. In the TV show, she has a teenage brother. The boarding house Stefan stayed in was also owned by an elderly woman instead of Stefan's and Damon's "uncle".
  • This isn't unique to Power Rangers either. Priest Poe from Space Sheriff Shaider was a transvestite, but his VR Troopers equivalent was a woman named Despera.
  • The Walking Dead did this to few notable characters from the comics:
    • The male Dr. Stevens from the comics subverts this. His name was given to a woman, but it turned out that he's a Decomposite Character, and Dr. Stevens' Character Development from the comics was given to Milton Mamet who is also male.
    • Twins Ben and Billy became sisters Lizzie (older) and Mika (younger) respectively. Ben did appeared beforehand though.
    • In Season 5, Alexandria Safe-Zone's first couple Douglas and Regina Monroe respectively gets introduced as Deanna and Reg Monroe.
  • Warehouse 13 plays with this trope; H.G. Wells is split into two people; the real H.G. Wells is Helena G. Wells, the genius inventor, adventurer, and warehouse agent. The man recognized as H. G. Wells is her older brother Charles, who chronicled her adventures using her abbreviated name as a pen name.
  • The Warrior Nun Netflix series changes Julian Salvius to Jillian Salvius.
  • Will & Grace. Will wanted to stage an all-male rendition of Ben-Hur titled "Ben-Him". Grace mentioned her mother appeared as "Millie Loman" in "Death of a Sales Lady". Grace's mother also mentions not even wanting to audition for 'The Ice-Person Cometh'.
  • The title character in NBC's live broadcast of The Wiz is played by Queen Latifah:
    Dorothy: The Wiz is...
    Cowardly Lion: ...a fraud!
    Tinman: ...and a woman!
    Dorothy: And what's wrong with being a woman?
  • The Twilight Zone (1959):
    • In "The Hitch-Hiker", the protagonist is a woman named Nan Adams. In The Orson Welles Show radio play by Lucille Fletcher on which it was based, the protagonist is a man named Ronald Adams. Fletcher was not pleased by this change. Furthermore, in the radio version, Ronald picks up a woman and briefly gives her a lift but she leaves after he tries to run over the hitch-hiker. In the television version, Nan gives a lift to a male sailor, who leaves for the same reason.
    • In "To Serve Man", a translator named Betty discovers the true meaning of the Kanamit book To Serve Man. In the short story by Damon Knight, it is a man named Gregori.
    • In "Four O'Clock", Oliver Crangle's parrot is a male named Pete. In the short story by Price Day, the parrot is a female named Pet.
    • In "Mute", the telepathic child is a girl named Ilse Nielsen while the Wheelers have lost their daughter Sally. In the short story by Richard Matheson, the telepathic child is a boy named Paal Nielsen while the Wheelers have lost their son David.
    • In "Of Late I Think of Cliffordville", Satan appears to William J. Feathersmith in the form of Miss Devlin. In the short story "Blind Alley" by Malcolm Jameson, Satan (most commonly called His Nibs) assumes a male form with the conventional appearance of "the vermilion anthropoid modified by barbed tail, cloven hoofs, horns and a wonderful sardonic leer."
  • The Twilight Zone (1985):
    • In "Dead Woman's Shoes", Maddie Duncan is possessed by the spirit of a murdered woman named Susan Montgomery when she puts on her expensive high heels. In the original episode "Dead Man's Shoes", the murdered gangster Dane's personality takes control of a homeless man named Nate Bledsoe when he puts on his two-tone black and white shoes.
    • In "To See the Invisible Man", Mitchell Chaplin meets an invisible woman who refuses to talk to him during his own sentence of invisibility. He later acknowledges her presence once he has completed his sentence. In the short story by Robert Silverberg, the other invisible person was a man.
    • In "Shadow Play", Adam Grant's defense attorney Erin Jacobs goes to the district attorney Mark Ritchie over her concerns that Adam may be telling the truth about all of them being characters in his recurring nightmare about being executed. In the original episode, the matter was first raised by the newspaper editor Paul Carson.
    • In "The Cold Equations", the Ship's Record clerk is a woman. In the short story by Tom Godwin, the clerk is a man.

    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 She & Him version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" has Zooey Deschanel singing the (usually male) "Wolf" part and M. Ward doing the (usually female) "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.

    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 
  • 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 unisex "alligator children" given that some of the kids were female. The seventh and youngest child 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.

    Theatre 
  • 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.

    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.
  • Plum Pudding in the original Strawberry Shortcake line was originally a boy, "he" was later reintroduced to the line as a "she".
  • 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.
  • Transformers: Power of the Primes had a G1-version of the Dinobot Slash from the Age of Extinction toyline that depicts the character as female, which continued in the Earth Wars mobile game and manga from Japanese releases of the concurrent toylines.

    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. Only the chosen PC survives the tutorial, and part of their motivation is tracking down their spouse's killer.
  • 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?
  • Onmyōji 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' Choice of Broadsides game 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 commander of a legion. 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.

    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 equivelant 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 .

    Web Original 

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • In The Amazing World of Gumball, when Nicole, her children and Larry are trying to chase Richard to prevent him from delivering the next pizza in time, so that Larry can fire him and prevent the fabric of the universe from being completely torn apart, the more they get close to him, the more they are affected by his universe-tearing power. In a brief instance, they become subjected to a gender flip, among other reality distortions such as a body swap or a realistic rendering of their cartoony selves.
  • The Adventure Time "Fionna and Cake" episodes (one per season since the fourth season) do this to pretty much every character in the show (except for the canonically agender BMO), including the theme song singer.
  • In The Animals of Farthing Wood animated series, Owl, Weasel, Kestrel and Adder, who were males in the books, were changed to females. Confusingly, Kestrel has male plumage.
    • Due to the fact that Adder, Weasel and Owl were females in the TV series, their love interests (who were females in the books) got their genders-swapped too, with them becoming males.
  • Animaniacs:
    • The creators couldn't get the rights to use Screwy Squirrel from Tex Avery MGM Cartoons, and thus, the equally violent Slappy Squirrel was born.
    • The Warners were also originally three brothers, but the third was sort of uninteresting, so she became a girl to add something new.
  • Avatar: The Last Airbender:
    • Fans often joke that the roles of the Evil Overlord's son and daughter on the Evil Overlord List are gender flipped with Zuko and Azula. The Nick website also suggests Ozai and Zuko are a rare Gender Flip of the Fairest of Them All trope.
    • The series also has two developmental gender flips: Toph and Azula both started as male characters (the latter being called "Prince Azul", and initially having a much smaller part that didn't come up until the end). The former gets a reference in The Ember Island Players, among many, many other in-jokes. The original male design for Toph went on to be reused for Avatar Roku's Earthbending teacher.
  • Barbie gets some meatier roles via Gender Flip in:
  • The Batman
  • In the original pilot of Bob's Burgers Tina was a boy named Daniel. This is particularly humourous considering the voices and personalities of both characters are identical.
  • In-universe example: The Danger Mouse episode "A Loo to a Kill" is set during the filming of a Danger Mouse movie, in which DM plays himself, and Penfold is played by Scarlett Johamster (and Promoted to Love Interest).
  • In DC Super Hero Girls, Harley Quinn's pet hyenas are girls named Lucy and Ethel instead of boys named Bud and Lou.
  • A particularly demented example occurs in Drawn Together on the episode "A Very Special Drawn Together Afterschool Special" where the characters, in an attempt to help Xandir prepare for revealing his homosexuality to his parents, role play as Xandir's parents (among other random roles). Eventually even this fake family has to see a therapist (Woldoor), who suggests that said role playing family role play yet again. This ends with Captain Hero being a meek, feminine housewife, Toot being a homophobic blue-collar father, and Xandir becoming a prostitute for Japanese businessmen.
  • In Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, Lavinia Forbes, the Baxter Building landlady who doesn't much like having a superhero team in her building but can't evict them, is a flip of Walter Collins, the Baxter Building landlord from early Fantastic Four comics, who doesn't much like having a superhero team in his building but can't evict them.
  • In the 90s cartoon version of Flash Gordon, Flash's ally Prince Thun of the Lion People became Princess Thundar.
  • Gargoyles was originally going to have Broadway as a female, but Executive Meddling didn't like the idea of an overweight female protagonist. It's worth noting that the clan was also originally going to be led by a female named Dakota, but she was considered uninteresting, so they reimagined her as Demona and created Goliath instead.
  • In Gerry Anderson's New Captain Scarlet, Seymour Griffiths (Code Name: Lt. Green) is replaced by Serena Lewis (also codenamed Lt. Green).
  • G.I. Joe: Resolute reimagined Dial Tone as a woman. On the subject as to why, Warren Ellis, who wrote it, said that Hasbro insisted a random tech he gave a lot of dialogue to be a named Joe and literally said that he picked Dial Tone "because it amused me."
  • Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales For Every Child occasionally did this to the characters, along with changing the stories to be more multiracial than the typically European originals. For example The Prince and the Pauper became "The Princess and the Pauper".
  • Ram Man from He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) is reimagined into Ram Ma'am in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021). Mosquitor is likewise remade into Mos'quita-ra.
  • Green Ghost and Shrinking Ray are both women in Invincible (2021), when they were male in the source comics.
  • Iron Man: Armored Adventures depicts the Mad Thinker, a middle-aged or elderly male in the comics, as a teenage girl.
  • In the original Inspector Gadget, MAD Cat was male. In the 2015 reboot, MAD Cat is female.
  • Used heavily in Jellystone!, switching numerous characters who were originally male to female. Among them are Jabberjaw, Augie Doggie, Squiddly Diddly, Brain, Choo-Choo, & Spook (now Spooky) of Top Cat, Loopy De Loop, and Yappee of Yippee, Yappee, and Yahooey.
  • Johnny Test: One episode had Johnny get into a Show Within a Show involving "An annoying younger sibling who pesters his twin brother mad scientists for experiments". None of the characters can place the similarities. The episode ends with Johnny and his Expy hanging out while both sets of twins have a double date.
  • In the early planning stages of the Justice League animated series, a female version of Cyborg was supposed to have been part of the main cast. Test footage of her even exists. The character design later appeared in the comics as Cyborg's Evil Counterpart and niece of his Love Interest.
  • In Justice League Unlimited, the second Queen from the Royal Flush Gang is a male Crossdresser rather than a woman. Not quite a straight example, though, since the Gang itself tends to have a revolving roster... For that matter, in both versions of the RFG seen in the series, we have Ace (the only carryover member) as a young preteen girl; in all comics before this and most adaptations (including distant-sequel Batman Beyond), Ace is a male character (and is often depicted as a cyborg or android with Super-Strength).
  • Little Miss Scatterbrain and Little Miss Stubborn have become Mr. Scatterbrain and Mr. Stubborn in The Mr. Men Show.
  • My Adventures with Superman:
    • In the comics, the Newsboy Legion was an entirely male group. Here, members Walter "Flippa Dippa" Johnson, Anthony "Gabby" Rodriguez, and Patrick "Scrapper" MacGuire are reimagined as the now female Flip Johnson, Gaby, and Patti, respectively, resulting in the team's name being changed to the Newskid Legion as well.
    • Male comics character Ron Troupe has been changed to the female Ronnie Troupe for this show.
    • Heat Wave is male in the comics, but appears as a woman in this show. While there is a female version of Heat Wave in the comics, the version seen in the show is meant to be an adaptation of the Mick Rory incarnation of the character.
    • An in-universe case of this trope occurs with the appearance of the League of Lois Lanes, which includes a male alternate of Lois named Lewis Lane and a female alternate of Jimmy named Jalana Olsen.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic did this to the Gen 3 pony Star Swirl, who was mentioned but not seen until his appearance in Season 7, and called Star Swirl the Bearded.
  • Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed: The Rock Special replaces the mole rats' patriarch Grand-pah from the original book with a matriarch named Grand-mah.
  • In The New Batman Adventures, Calendar Man's counterpart is a former model called Calendar Girl (name aside, though, she's a very different character).
  • When they are introduced in the second season of Winx Club, the Pixies were all female. But in the Spin-Off series Pop Pixie (that is an Alternate Universe), some of them who had significant roles in the original series (Digit, Livy, Zing, and Jolly) have had gender alterations and are male now.
    • It is also confirmed by the creator that Helia was supposed to be a girl, hence why he has a female name. It's likely he was supposed to be the new 6th Winx fairy (as well as Flora's best friend), but his gender was changed so he could become a love interest.
  • The animated adaptation of the Redwall book Martin the Warrior changed the gender of the hedgehog character Pallum from male to female. This was because it was thought there were not enough female characters in the main cast.
  • Zig-zagged in Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Grand Finale appears to reveal that The Foot Recruit, who's female, is a gender flipped version of Casey Jones, but the real deal debuts in the Big Damn Movie, enlisting the Turtles' help in preventing his Bad Future from coming to pass who reveals that the former is his mother.
  • In Robin Hood: Mischief in Sherwood, the role of Will Scarlet is filled by a girl named Scarlett in order to avert The Smurfette Principle.
  • The CGI Rupert cartoon flipped Pong Ping and Ferdy Fox into females, renaming them "Ping Pong" and "Frieda" respectively.
  • Sad Cat, an early (and forgotten) Ralph Bakshi character, was a gender-flipped version of "Cinderella" (with evil step-brothers instead of evil step-sisters, and the fairy godmother being a male "Gadmouse"), a rare female-to-male example of this trope.
  • Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century has Inspector Lestrade as a female (she's a descendant of the male Lestrade from the original Sherlock Holmes stories, and also a major fan of the master detective in general).
  • When The Simpsons puts their cast members in another story to parody the original, occasionally Lisa will be given a role that was originally male. For instance, Lisa was given equivalent roles for Sherlock Holmes, Johnny "Connie" Appleseed, and Amadeus (as Sally Eri).
  • Implied with Kaa from the animated short Welcome to the Club, she has a female voice, presumably with the intent of homaging Scarlett Johansson's performance in the 2016 film.
  • Azrael, the cat from The Smurfs (1981) was female in the comic books, but is male in the TV show, later comics, and live-action movie.
  • Despite not appearing in She-Ra: Princess of Power aside from being mentioned in the series bible and relegated to a toyline-exclusive character, Double Trouble (who is female) is gender flipped to non-binary for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power along with using "they/them" pronouns.
    • Additionally, the peacock-themed seer Peekablue is male in the reboot, thus averting his original-series counterpart's Animal Gender-Bender. He is appropriately a Bishōnen...at least, if Double Trouble's impersonation of him is accurate; the real Peekablue never actually appears.
    • The Star Sisters also became the Star Siblings, with Jewelstar being male. Interestingly enough, the Star Sisters and Princess Peekablue were namedropped in the "Princess Prom" episode (though they didn't appear on-screen), and Double Trouble was visible in some background shots of the same episode.
  • Spidey and His Amazing Friends changes Dr. Octopus into a girl.
  • Transformers: Animated:
    • Changed the character of Red Alert from The Unicron Trilogy from a male to a female for their own version of Red Alert. In fact, they originally wanted Ratchet to be female and have Red Alert's name, but the final version of the show changed Ratchet back into a male, and made Red Alert a separate character.
      • Interestingly, Ratchet was intended to be female in the original Marvel comics. But Executive Meddling made him male to the Transformers toyline's "no gender" rule and being for boys.
    • Also, the comic story "The Stunticon Job" depicts the Animated version of Drag Strip as a femme.
  • Transformers: Cyberverse:
    • Cosmos is reinterpreted as female rather than male.
    • This continuity's version of Swoop, introduced in the TV movie The Immobilizers, is female when all prior incarnations of the Dinobot were male.
    • A few of the Seekers had their genders changed as well. Nova Storm and Skywarp were male in G1 and female in Cyberverse. Acid Storm was supposed to follow suit but was animated with both the male and female Seeker body types so the writers decided to make them non-binary.
    • The Quintesson Judge has five faces and normally all faces are presented as male while here two are women whilst the other three are men.
    • Clobber's exisence is due to this. She's clearly designed as a female version of the Animated character Lugnut, and in fact was intended to be, but Hasbro executives forced the show's crew to rename and make her a separate character.
  • Transformers: EarthSpark:
    • Just like in Cyberverse, Skywarp and Nova Storm appear as female robots.
    • The Decepticon Cassette Frenzy is also female in this continuity.
  • In The Mondo TV version of The Trash Pack, as a way to give a gender balance to the main Trashies, Scum Gum, Scabby Cat, and Sour Snail were made female, as opposed to the male pronouns they were given in the toyline. When Scum Gum and Sour Snail returned in the webseries, they were reverted back to male.
  • The "Spider-Verse" arc in Ultimate Spider-Man (2012) introduces Petra Parker, a.k.a. Spider-Girl, a teen girl version of Peter Parker from an alternate universe. Petra's Earth also contains female versions of Nick Fury (Nicole Fury), Harry Osborn (Harriet Osborn), J. Jonah Jameson (J. Joanne Jameson) and Norman Osborn (Norma Osborn).
  • In Voltron: Legendary Defender, it's revealed that the series' version of Pidge is really a girl named Katie Holt. She's pulling a Sweet Polly Oliver to join the Galactic Garrison and locate her missing brother, since she was banned from their facility for breaking in one too many times.
  • The cartoon version of Watership Down has the book character Blackberry made from a buck to a doe. Many fans were displeased about this, since half the plot of the original is about the fact that they need does to establish a successful warren.
  • Wolverine and the X-Men (2009):
    • Arclight, a woman in the comics, was remade into a man. Word of God is that they didn't feel comfortable having Cyclops violently confront a woman while on a warpath as he did to the show's Arclight when he asked about Sinister's location, believing he has Jean.
    • Master Mold is female. Of course, Master Mold has always been a robot that gave birth to other robots, but he was previously referred to as male anyway.
  • Spyke from X-Men: Evolution seems like a black, male version of Marrow, but Word of God is that they was a complete coincidence. The show's creator claimed he had never heard of Marrow prior to working on the show, which is not too implausible given the character's relative obscurity.
  • In Young Justice (2010):
    • Red Inferno and Red Torpedo have their genders flipped from the original comics. This is because the show establishes that the two were originally the Golden Age heroes Red Torpedo and Firebrand, and thus their genders needed to match their 40's counterparts (Greg even commented on this, including his confusion at the original change).
    • Asami "Sam" Koizumi is a female version of Samurai from Superfriends.
    • The Newsboy Legion is reimagined as the Newsgirl Legion, with Tommy Thompkins changed to Tommi Thompkins, Tony "Big Words" Rodriguez to Antonia "Big Words" Rodriguez and John "Gabby" Gabrielli to Gabi Gabrielli.
    • Rictus is also changed from a man to a woman.
    • The Child from Amethyst, Princess of Gemworld appears in the fourth season, but with their human form now that of a little girl rather than a boy.
  • In the original Pet Alien toyline, Shank and Dank were both male. In the show, Shank is instead female while Dank stays male.

 
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League of Lois Lanes + Olsens

The League of Lois Lanes is made up of alternate versions of Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen.

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Alliance of Alternates

Alternative Title(s): Gender Flipped, Gender Lift

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League of Lois Lanes + Olsens

The League of Lois Lanes is made up of alternate versions of Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen.

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Main / AllianceOfAlternates

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