History Main / InsectGenderBender

* Charmy (a rarely-seen character from some ''Franchise/SonicTheHedgehog'' games) is a male bee with a stinger. He's also a 'child' despite not being a larva.

* ''VideoGame/JetForceGemini'': Downplayed in the 64 shooter as the default alien [[InsectoidAliens ant soldiers]], known as Soldier Drones, as well as most of their variants, are identified female in the multiplayer mode. There are soldier males of their species, though, which resemble termites.

When an insect society [[BeePeople like that of ants or bees]] is depicted in fantasy media, the hero of the story will usually be... a male worker? The fact that the workers in Hymenopteran social insect colonies (ants, bees, wasps, etc.) are all females (albeit sterile), and the only males exist to fertilize the queen and [[OutWithABang quickly die after this mission is complete]], sometimes by [[GroinAttack the queen ripping the male's genitalia out of his body]], seems to have no bearing on the need for making the hero a male. After all, you NEED a "Male Lead" who can go out on adventures and save princesses. And as the only actual males in an anthill spend their entire lives doing nothing but providing the queen with a constant supply of genetic material... makes it hard to set up any kind of adventure-hooks.

Fiction also tends to show an even or near even split between males to females, when there are barely a few hundred males for thousands of females in most insect societies due to the nature of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-determination_system how sexes are decided.]] And don't expect the "exist solely to have sex and die" thing to get anything more than a passing DoubleEntendre. It probably doesn't help that, in common slang, a "drone" is someone or something who works mindlessly, so a lot of people think that "worker bees" (the sterile females who [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin work]]) and "drones" (the males who do a different kind of work) are just different names for the same thing.

** A lawyer points out that the main character's parents are actually siblings to make bees look bad. This is even more stupid when you consider that all bees in a generation share a common mother in the queen, and the father would be some drone who died after mating. The protagonist Barry as well as the "pollen jocks" are all male, even though all worker bees are ''female''.

** Females rule the colony, and while some see many of the minor workers as female that doesn't detract from the fact the movie centers around a male worker.

* Literature/PerryRhodan, due to its nature as an extreme LongRunner written by a team of authors, sometimes averts this trope and sometimes plays it straight. In one memorable case, however, it manages to get ''this'' correct but still mess up. In one storyline shortly after the Earth has been teleported across the galaxy (long story), we're introduced to the dominant species of the sector (insectoid; beelike, to be specific) with a slightly disturbing scene [[ShownTheirWork where drones are rounded up and executed by the workers after having fulfilled their duty while the queen muses on how lucky she was to have been, among other things, fed the right kind of nectar so she won't have to take care of that]] - then switches over to a lengthy explanation of how [[YouFailBiologyForever the insects developed because there's too little cosmic radiation in that sector of the galaxy]] [[EvolutionaryLevels for mammals to evolve quickly enough, causing insects became sentient first]].

* Edward from ''VideoGame/BestFiends'' is a male mosquito that regrets his former blood sucking ways, and has since switched to coconut water. However, as a male mosquito, he should have had a diet like that to begin with.

[-[[caption-width-right:350:[[https://www.combatbugs.com/bug-files/why-are-there-no-%E2%80%9Cking%E2%80%9D-ants And we thought ants live in a matriarchal society...]]]]-]

* In ''Film/{{Antman}}'' Scott consistently refers to the worker ants that aid him with male pronouns, even naming one "Antony". While this would hardly change the actual biological sex of the ants, but no one bothers to correct him. He continues the trend in ''Film/AntmanAndTheWasp'', coming up with more [[PunnyName Punny Names]] that are male-inspired, like "Ant-onio Banderas". Still no one comments.

* The [[VideoGame/PokemonBlackAndWhite fifth generation]] of ''{{Franchise/Pokemon}}'' introduced durant, an ant based pokemon. They lack queens and they all seem to be workers that can be either male or female.

* Averted in ''Literature/TheHeroicAdventureOfHerculesAmsterdam''; no male ants actually appear, but they apparently serve as slaves for females. At one point the Queen actually exiles a female worker into slavery, accusing her of secretly being a "weak" male in disguise.

* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bee_(mythology) Bee deities]] in greek, baganda, hittite and hindu mythology are all female, suggesting that people in these areas knew what the gender of drones and queens was long before european scientists.

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Fiction also tends to show an even or near even split between males to females, when there are barely a few hundred males for thousands of females in most insect societies due to the nature of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-determination_system how sexes are decided.]] And don't expect the "exist solely to have sex and die" thing to get anything more than a passing DoubleEntendre. It probably doesn't help that, in common slang, a "drone" is someone or something who works mindlessly, so a lot of people think that "worker bees" (the sterile females who [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin work]]) and "drones" (the males who do a different kind of work) are just different names for the same thing. Termites are

** Combee is based on worker honey bees. Not only they can be either male or female, but also males are more frequent, having a ratio of seven males for every female. However, only those rare female combees can evolve into vespiqueen.

* The [[VideoGame/PokemonBlackAndWhite fifth generation]] of ''{{Franchise/Pokemon}}'' introduced durant, an ant bassed pokemon. They lack queens and they all seem to be workers that can be either male or female.

* In ''VideoGame/PokemonSunAndMoon'', the Ultra Beast Buzzwole, based off a mosquito, resembles a male bodybuilder with muscles formed from blood sacs. Similarly, its counterpart Pheremosa, based off a cockroach, resembles a female supermodel, with a slender body and a hair-like carapace that extends beyond its abdomen. However, only female mosquitoes suck blood, and only male cockroaches are thinner than the females, with a carapace that extends beyond their abdomen. Though both of them are genderless, this feature is likely more of an excuse to make them non-breedable than anything else. However, seeing as how both ''are'' [[EldritchAbomination Ultra Beasts]], this may very well have been [[IntendedAudienceReaction invoked]] in order to make them more bizarre and off-putting.

Fiction also tends to show an even or near even split between males to females, when there are barely a few hundred males for thousands of females in most insect societies due to the nature of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haplodiploid_sex-determination_system how sexes are decided.]] And don't expect the "exist solely to have sex and die" thing to get anything more than a passing DoubleEntendre. It probably doesn't help that, in common slang, a "drone" is someone or something who works mindlessly, so a lot of people think that "worker bees" (the sterile females who [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin work]]) and "drones" (the males who do a different kind of work) are just different names for the same thing.

* While bees, ants, and social wasps in real life obviously avert this trope, [[TermiteTrouble termites]] actually play it straight. Termites aren't related to bees, ants, and wasps, so they evolved eusociality completely separately. For example, reproductive male termites don't die after sex--they spend the rest of their lives in the nest with the queen, and are called "kings". The workers can also be either male or female.

Another reason for this trope is that all insect movies necessarily anthropomorphise their subjects, including by imposing human gender roles on them; often this extends to related tropes like NonMammalMammaries. Any fully accurate depiction of a society of sentient insects would be extremely creepy, with none of the characters being remotely sympathetic. Unlike giving insects human speech, faces, family structures, etc., however, this trope can [[ObligatoryJoke bug people]] because it doesn't seem as necessary -- there's no reason the protagonist and main supporting cast of a story ''have'' to be male, so casting a creature that would biologically be female as a male is seen as a less [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality Acceptable Break From Reality]].

A subtrope of ArtisticLicenseBiology. Can be combination of SomewhereAnEntomologistIsCrying and MostWritersAreHuman. Subtrope of AnimalGenderBender. Can be an example of the TheSmurfettePrinciple.

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* Charmy (a rarely-seen character from some VideoGame/SonicTheHedgehog games) is a male bee with a stinger. He's also a 'child' despite not being a larva.

* Averted, interestingly, in Literature/TheBible, in Proverbs 6:6. Considering when that particular book was written and translated, it's probably a manifestation of noun gender (both the Old English and Hebrew words for ant are feminine, not neuter and thus anything other than "her" would be a grammatical error).

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Antz}}'' portrays [[GenderIsNoObject males and females among both soldiers and workers]]. The ero, naturally, is male.