History Main / TheCoverChangesTheGender

* All of the various "I Kissed A Guy" covers on Website/YouTube.

* Music/SoftCell's {{cover|edUp}} of Gloria Jones' "Tainted Love" changes the line "all a girl could give" to "all a boy can give."

* "Tainted Love" was originally sung by Gloria Jones in 1964. Due to several popular covers, such as Soft Cell's and Marilyn Manson's, the song is more often associated with male singers.

* Averted by Max Vernon's cover of "I Kissed A Girl": he kept the lyrics, [[TheCoverChangesTheMeaning which changed the meaning of the song]].

* Overlapping with WhatCouldHaveBeen, Music/PatBenatar's "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" was originally written from a male point of view. When Benatar got the song, only the line "before you put another notch in your lipstick case" had to be switched and became "before I put another notch in my lipstick case". This added the interesting implication that the female singer has a history of warding off suitors and might be a bit of a heartbreaker herself.

* The cover of [[WesternAnimation/{{Hercules}} "Zero To Hero"]] by Music/JonathanYoung and Savannah Stuckmeyer doesn't change the pronouns, which makes sense considering the subject matter is Hercules. What ''is'' hilarious is all the lines where the Muses are DistractedByTheSexy are sung in Young's BassoProfundo.

* Maddie Ross' cover of Lustra's "Scotty Doesn't Know" doesn't change the gender of anyone but the singer, meaning that in the context of the song Scotty doesn't know that his girlfriend (Fiona) is cheating on him with a woman. Given that Maddie Ross is engaged to a woman, it's not hard to understand why she'd be comfortable singing a song about sleeping with someone's girlfriend.

* ''Theatre/MammaMia'' turns "Lay All Your Love On Me", which was sung entirely from a female perspective, into a duet between Sophie and her fiancé Sky. Sky sings the first verse, altered from "Now every woman I see is a potential threat" into "Now every man that I see...".

* Music/TheBeatles covered "Boys", originally by girl group The Shirelles. They did change the line "Mama says when you kiss my lips/I'll get a thrill through my fingertips" to "My girl says when I kiss her lips/She gets a thrill through her fingertips", but kept the overall lyrical focus of the song on boys rather than flipping it to be "Girls". Roughly half the song consists of variations on the line "Well, I'm talking about boys".

* Strangely done by two Har Mar Superstar songs originally intended for other artists: he wrote "Girls Only" and "Tall Boy" with the intention of giving them to Film/TheCheetahGirls and Music/BritneySpears respectively. When both declined, he put out his own versions without any lyrical changes. The former is about a girls' night out and finds him singing about having "the cutest little cuticles". The latter is ''technically'' about going to a party and drinking "tall boys", as in large cans of beer, but it's [[IntercourseWithYou also full of innuendo]] that could apply to wanting a literal "tall boy" ("where's my tall boy?/ to satisfy my needs/ feel like drinking/ so come on get inside of me").

* Music/MichaelBuble's cover of "drivers license" by Music/OliviaRodrigo for Creator/TheBBC Radio 2 Piano Room, the lines "And you're probably with that blonde girl/Who always made me doubt/She's so much older than me/She's everything I'm insecure about" become "And you're probably with that blond guy/Who always made me doubt/He's so much smarter than me/He's everything I'm insecure about".

* Corey Cox's cover of Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine," a LoveNostalgiaSong about a woman looking back on her first intimate relationship at the age of 17. He keeps the lyrics largely the same, which makes the song come off less like a woman discussing moving away from being TheIngenue and more like MoreExperiencedChasesTheInnocent. Particularly since it keeps the chorus the same, in which the girl's youth is emphasized ("Like strawberry wine/Seventeen/The hot July noon/Saw everything"); in the original, this just adds to her portrayal of herself as TheIngenue, while the gender flip in the cover makes it seem more like it's emphasizing the UnequalPairing of him being both college-aged and working for her grandfather.

* Corey Cox's cover of Deana Carter's "Strawberry Wine," a LoveNostalgiaSong about a woman looking back on her first intimate relationship at the age of 17. He keeps the lyrics largely the same, which makes the song come off less like a woman discussing moving away from being TheIngenue and more like MoreExperiencedChasesInnocent. Particularly since it keeps the chorus the same, in which the girl's youth is emphasized ("Like strawberry wine/Seventeen/The hot July noon/Saw everything"); in the original, this just adds to her portrayal of herself as TheIngenue, while the gender flip in the cover makes it seem more like it's emphasizing the UnequalPairing of him being both college-aged and working for her grandfather.

* In the Robots in Disguise cover of "[[Music/TheKinks You Really Got Me]]," all references to "girl" (i.e., "Girl, you really got me now") are changed to "boy".

* In the Danish 1970's pop song "Boom Boom" by ''Mabel'', a man goes the doctor because he feels ill with heavy heartbeat and other symptoms. In the chorus of the song, the doctor says "hjertet hamrer løs, når man er forelsket i en pige" ("the heart beats fast when you're in love with a girl"). When the Danish TeenPop group ''Small*Talk'', which consists of two (presumably straight) teen girls, covers the song, the doctor's line in the chorus is changed to "hjertet hamrer løs, når man er forelsket, lille pige" ("the heart beats fast when you're in love, little girl").

* Averted ''twice'' on [[Music/SonicYouth Ciccone Youth]]'s ''The Whitey Album'', with Kim Gordon's cover of RobertPalmer's "Addicted to Love" and Thurston Moore's cover of {{Music/Madonna}}'s "Into the Groove"; the album itself is a tongue-in-cheek "tribute" to 80's music and pop culture.

** 1,000 Mona Lisas did the same with their cover, which was something of a novelty hit in the 90's.

* The 1990's Randy Travis' song "I Told You So" is sung in the first person and has no gender-specific words. Carrie Underwood covered it with ease recently without having to change the lyrics.

Change the lyrics, of course! Most of the time this will entail no more than switching a couple of pronouns (a man would sing "and you're having my baby" while the woman might sing it "and I'm having my baby" or change it to "and I'm having ''our'' baby") or changing "boy" to "girl" (or vice versa) but in some cases it can require a much more extensive rewrite. Another common way of doing this is giving the song a PerspectiveFlip - i.e. "then he kissed me" becomes "then I kissed her."

* Male covers of the Christmas classic "Santa Baby" go in two directions: the straight version "Santa Buddy," which has been roundly mocked for removing all flirty undertones, and the gay version "Santa Daddy," which said to hell with ''under''tones.

* Music/MichaelBuble:
** His cover of "drivers license" by Music/OliviaRodrigo for Creator/TheBBC Radio 2 Piano Room, the lines "And you're probably with that blonde girl/Who always made me doubt/She's so much older than me/She's everything I'm insecure about" become "And you're probably with that blond guy/Who always made me doubt/He's so much smarter than me/He's everything I'm insecure about".

* Male covers of the Christmas classic "Santa Baby" go in two directions: the straight male version "Santa Buddy," which has been roundly mocked for removing all flirty undertones, and the gay male version "Santa Daddy," which said to hell with ''under''tones.

* In Music/MichaelBuble's cover of "drivers license" by Music/OliviaRodrigo for Creator/TheBBC Radio 2 Piano Room, the lines "And you're probably with that blonde girl/Who always made me doubt/She's so much older than me/She's everything I'm insecure about" become "And you're probably with that blond guy/Who always made me doubt/He's so much smarter than me/He's everything I'm insecure about".

* Music/{{Blondie}}'s [[CoveredUp more famous version]] of "The Tide Is High" by The Paragons does this ("I'm not the kind of man that gives up just like that" becomes "I'm not the kind of ''girl''...", for instance)

* In recent years, since Music/AshleyTisdale did a cover of "Kiss The Girl" in 2006, it's become common for that song to be sung by women. Before that, in TheNineties it was a rarely covered song and it was done by men, but look on Website/YouTube and you'll find cover songs of "Kiss The Girl" done by women outnumber those done by men by about 20 to 1. It's gotten to where people forget that it was sung by Sebastian and not Ariel in ''WesternAnimation/{{The Little Mermaid|1989}}''. The unusual thing is, the words entirely remain the same, but the connotations completely change, when sung by a man it's always a third person urging to just follow his heart and kiss the girl he loves, when sung by a woman it becomes a not-so-subtle hint to the guy she likes that she's growing impatient with his hesitation.

* "Triad" was originally a CutSong from Music/TheByrds' ''Notorious Byrd Brothers'' album, then David Crosby gave it to Music/JeffersonAirplane to record - the original lyrics had a male narrator suggesting a two woman, one man threesome, while the Jefferson Airplane version, sung by Grace Slick, changes some pronouns to make it two men and a woman. Interestingly, their version still mentions "your long hair flowing"; since both versions were recorded in TheSixties, that description could apply to someone of either gender.

* Music/{{Blondie}} have a couple of examples of playing this straight, but have also averted it with their cover of Music/BuddyHolly's "I'm Gonna Love You Too". Granted, the only line in the original that mentioned gender was "after all, another fella took ya", but leaving that in does change potential interpretations of the song: in the Buddy Holly version it's "another fella" as in "a man other than me", but having a woman sing that line makes it sound like both the subject of the song and the person he's currently with are men.

* Averted by Me First And The Gimme Gimmes' [[JustForPun Are A Drag]], an entire album of non-gender-flipped covers of originally female songs.

* "Blues in the Night" was originally written to be sung by a male prisoner about women with lines like "a woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave you to sing the blues in the night." Rosemary Clooney and Dinah Shore later recorded versions where a woman is being warned about men by her mother. The song's second line in this version is [[GirlishPigtails "when I was in pigtails"]] instead of "when I was in kneepants."