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Gender Flip
Go on. Try and guess who she is.

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 the recasting of his role in the American remake of The Wicker Man

Here's a quick spin on an old story. Flip the traditionally male roles to the women and the women's to the men. If you are in a hurry, you don't need to change much but a few names and the casting.

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 occasionally have Gender Flip variants; they are invariably played absolutely straight.

Fan Fics that gender flip are fairly common (they're often tagged as 'Genderfuck', or 'GF').

A Gender Flip may also happen for some, but not all, characters in The Remake, especially if the original version suffered from The Smurfette Principle.

Compare Distaff Counterpart, Shes A Man In Japan and Gender Bender.

Examples

Anime and Manga

Comic Books
  • Redlance and Nightfall of Elf Quest are a couple whose gender roles are deliberately reversed and they're perfectly comfortable with it. Redlance (the guy) is shy, gentle and nurturing, while Nightfall is a tough hunter and warrior. In one scene she even goes off to war leaving him to look after the kids. This is in direct contrast to Strongbow (a bad tempered, taciturn tough guy) and his quiet, submissive partner Moonshade. These characters were intended to bookend the elves' entire range of gender types, but ironically some fans complained about Moonshade's submissiveness while never batting an eyelid at Redlance's.
  • 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.
  • One issue of the old Weird Science comic featured an America where gender roles were switched, ostensibly after a woman took the presidency and then influenced big business. While the story could have had potential, it was undermined by being very heavy-handed; rather than having, for instance, the women use female viewpoints and opinions in their new social positions, they assume roles and behaviors almost identical to males; men become meek, retiring 'househusbands', while working women kick back at the strip bar (with rather unattractive male strippers), and so on. The only aversions made are usually wholly inappropriate, such as a group of female miners forming a strike for the right to have a powder room (to fix their makeup) on each level of the mine. The story ends with the male narrator, in a hospital, rushed off to the Paternity Ward...
    • An episode of Sliders had the same idea, and carried it off reasonably well. Women, having been in charge for generations, have become self-indulgent and arrogant in more or less the same way as extremely patriarchal men, but people there also have slightly different ideals and priorities than people in our own world. The female politician Arturo ends up running against in an election believes that men are unfit for positions of power because they aren't as good at cooperation and peaceful negotiation as women, and Arturo's attempt to throw the election by pretending that a debate has hurt his feelings (which he assumes will make the voters regard him as being overly sensitive) instead causes him to win, because he comes off as human and relatable.
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation did something similar. The Enterprise visited a planet where the women ran the show and the men were in subservient positions. The women acted as stereotypical men and vice versa. The only really interesting thing to note is that the men actually did look smaller and frailer and the women looked bigger and tougher than is typical.
  • Quite late in Grant Morrison's Shining Knight mini, we learn that Sir Ystin (a cross-time counterpart of the original Shining Knight, Sir Justin ... sort of) is secretly Ystina.
  • Mike W. Barr likes this trope and used it both in Camelot 3000 for Tristan and in Mantra (first series) for the title character.
  • One issue of Spider Man Fairy Tales was yet another gender-flipped Cinderella. Peter was Cinders, with Norman and Harry Osborne as the evil stepfather and stepbrother, Gwen as the princess, and MJ is a servant at the Osbornes who helps Peter (possibly a gender flipped version of the Panto character Buttons).
  • GI Joe Reloaded, an Ultimate Universe attempt for the franchise published by Devil's Due, Gender Flipped "Doc" into a female Twofer Token Minority to help avert The Smurfette Principle.

Fairy Tales

Film
  • The Jerry Lewis movie CinderFella.
  • In one of the most famous examples of this trope, Ripley of the Alien series takes a role usually filled by a man. The writers of the original script kept things basic so they could have any character be male or female; somebody suggested Ripley be a woman and they liked the idea, so they used it. Only in later films did she receive her first name of Ellen.
  • Conversely, Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead plays what is essentially the Final Girl of the horror movie. His first name, Ashley, is even feminine. By the sequels, however, he's a Bad Ass.
    • Not that this was actually planned ahead of time. The order in which characters died mirrored the order in which the actors left. Apparently Campbell was the one without a life.
  • The character of Dizzy Flores in Starship Troopers was a man in the original Robert A. Heinlein novel. He was switched to a she and played by Dina Meyers in the movie. Roughnecks followed the movie's lead.
    • Note that in the book, ground combat roles were filled by men with above-average upper-body strength, while all pilots were women, who had better reflexes and higher g tolerance.
  • The live-action adaptation of Disney's The Jungle Book gender-bends Bagheera - and Bagheera alone - so that s/he's a female for the duration of a movie. (This is presumably so Mowgli would have a motherly figure, but it's still odd when it's your first time viewing the adaption as a kid when the only version you've seen as a kid is the animated one, where Bagheera is a dude.
  • Done in two recent versions of Treasure Island. In Muppet Treasure Island, Ben Gunn is changed to Benjamina Gunn just so Miss Piggy can have a role to play. In Treasure Planet, the captain is a feline lady alien named Amelia.
  • The famous duet of seduction date rape "Baby, It's Cold Outside" was first introduced in the movie Neptune's Daughter by Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban. 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.
  • The film version of Sergeant Bilko turned Cpl Rocky Barbella into Cpl Raquelle Barbella. (Bilko's other sidekick, Cpl Henshaw, was given a Race Lift).
  • A 1990s adaptation of Mickey Spillaine'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 Spillaine's Mike Danger worked with a Lt. Patrick Chandler in the 1950s, but his descendent Patricia after he was thawed out in the future.
  • Head Over Heels 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.
  • Most shadowcasts of the Rocky Horror Picture Show will let anyone, regardless of gender, audition for any part.
    • Except the gender [[spoiler fuck]] shows that specifically flip the roles.

Literature
  • 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.
    • King Lear is itself loosely based on the story of how, in the early 6th century, Clovis Merovingian divided France up among his three sons for them to rule equally, which didn't turn out so well — Lear is a Gender Flip to begin with.
    • 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.
  • Even stranger than the King Lear examples above, 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 problems as well: it thought it was set in a dance club Twenty Minutes Into The Future.)
  • Matthew Bourne's "Swan Lake" took the ballet and turned all the swans into male characters.
  • Neil Simon wrote a version of The Odd Couple with every role gender swapped, simply called The Odd Couple: Female Version. The biggest difference is that the British Cuckoo Pigeon sisters are changed to a pair of Italian brothers, whose names and accents become the source of a great deal of wordplay.
  • Cinderellis and the Glass Hill, by Gail Carson Levine, 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.)
    • Cinderellis and the Glass Hill is based on a Norwegian fairy tale called The Princess on the Glass Hill
  • This shows up in a Stainless Steel Rat story from Harry Harrison. The Adventure Town planet he has to rescue happens to have a very matriarchal structure. The male lead ends up in the standard uniform of the invaded planet's army for a while. For some reason, if memory serves, the heels weren't quite the same as you see on normal combat boots.
  • The ''Khaavren Romances'' are a fantasy recycling of The Three Musketeers and the rest of that series. 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 Ladette.
  • 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 The Light Fantastic Cohen the barbarian attempts to free the virgin girl sacrifice from the deadly druid priesthood. He goes through the priests like a chainsaw through butter, but Cohen is about 90 years old at this point, and his back goes out. He ends up fleeing the temple, slung over the shoulder of the virgin girl.
    • 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.
    • In Monstrous Regiment the whole point of the story is that the 'Male Only' military is really half female.
    • Equal Rites has elements of A Wizard Of Earthsea, with Esk in Ged's role.

Live Action TV
  • The X Files gets part of its peculiar feel from the male lead and female lead taking on the aspects usually given to the other gender: Mulder is intuitive and ready to believe, while Scully is hard-nosed and science-minded. Mulder was right.
  • Similarly, in Stargate SG-1 Carter is the one who can identify leptons by mass. Daniel Jackson is the one who believes aliens built the pyramids. (In Daniel's defense... they did.) It goes much deeper than that, however. Carter is also shown as the second most proficient fighter, with the current team leader being the most proficient. Especially in the early episodes Dr. Jackson is shown as barely knowing how to hold a gun, much less use it, while Carter mows down bad guys and calls tactics. Stargate, in general, has been on the good side of this trope, Teyla in Stargate Atlantis is also shown to be an extremely capable fighter, able to teach the guys a thing or two, while McKay is even worse than Jackson.
  • 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.
  • Hot Amazon Zoe and pilot Wash in Firefly are a case similar to Redlance and Nightfall from Elfquest listed above.
  • Pamela Anderson sitcom Stacked was basically a Gender Flip version of the Sam & Diane relationship in Cheers with the Book Dumb popular extrovert (Skyler) being female and the socially inept academic (Gavin) being male.
  • One episode of Flight Of The Conchords had Bret in a relationship in which all the male and female clichés were reversed (Bret wanted a long-term relationship, while the woman he was with just wanted sex, and pretended she was getting shipped out to Iraq).
    • A similar gag was used in Scrubs when Elliot was dating a male nurse. And to a lesser extent with her relationship with Keith.
      Dr Kelso: You were having an argument, but it was like he's the chick and you're the guy.
  • The Battlestar Galactica remake Gender Flips Starbuck and Boomer (also a Race Lift) from the original. And Commander (now Admiral) Cain.
  • Both perpetuated and subverted in Remington Steele. The woman is actually the brains behind the detective agency, but a con man plays the part of the private eye. However, while he's a lead, she's still the boss.
  • Robin and Ted's relationship in How I Met Your Mother had this feel — Ted wanted to settle down and have kids, while Robin shied away from commitment.
    • When Ted tells the story of how he lost his virginity, it seems very conventional. He later confesses that he switched the roles—actually, the girl was the lying cad, and he was the naive kid with a crush.
  • The crew of the Red Dwarf meet the GenderFlipped versions of themselves in a parallel universe.
    • Although, not all of them were flipped. Cat, the ultimate narcissist, is looking forward to meeting the feminine version of himself for... obvious reasons. It turns out, his counterpart on the 'female' ship is a dog with zero dress sense.
  • Chuck is the gender-flipped version of the toughened, emotionless spy (Sarah) falling for the sensitive, caring normal guy (Chuck) she's protecting. The series also plays with gender-flipping with Ellie and Awesome's relationship; in one episode, when the couple are buying engagement gifts, Ellie chooses the wide-screen TV while Awesome goes for the washing machine.
  • All That Glitters was a soap opera/sitcom in 1977, created by Norman Lear. The series depicted an alternate world where the women are dominant corporate executives, and the men are househusbands and secretaries. Only lasted for 13 episodes, but stirred up quite a reaction from critics at the time.
  • Will And 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".
  • 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).
  • Buffy The Vampire Slayer, like Aliens, features tough girls fighting monsters.

Video Games
  • The entire point behind Super Princess Peach was to give Peach a starring role where she saves the Mario Bros. from Bowser for a change. With... Flowers, hearts, and magical mood swing powers.
  • Oh yes, and Samus Is A Girl for a reason.
  • The "For Girl" versions of Harvest Moon and Tokimeki Memorial games.
  • Warriors Orochi Z recently features a genderflipped Tang Sanzang AKA Genjou Sanzou as their most recent addition.
  • In Onimusha 2, Word Of God states that the Yagyu Jubei who is the main character is the grandfather of the Yagyu Jubei. ...then Onimusha 4 comes out and there's a Jubei (it's a title in the family) and she's his granddaughter...
  • The Persona 3 Videogame Remake for the PSP is going to have the option to have a female version of the protagonist. There are also shots of a male version of Elizabeth named "Theodore." The fandom has taken this and ran with it in terms of fanart.
  • Lightning is billed as a Distaff Counterpart to Cloud Strife.

Webcomics
  • Arthur King Of Time And Space has Dame Tristram, Dame Argavaine and (female-term-for-squire) Gaheris. At least in the space arc. Tristram is also female in the contemporary arc, but the others haven't appeared yet. Isolde is female in all arcs, and this makes no difference to Tristram's story.

Western Animation
  • The Princess and the Pauper, a girls' video based on Barbie dolls.
  • 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.
  • Kim Possible has female Kim playing the competent, repressed, easily-embarrassed, uncertain hero in need of reassurance; and male Ron playing the intuitive, accepting, undiscriminating, adoring, clumsy 'girl friday', who suffers clothing damage regularly.
  • Some have accused Johnny Test of being a gender-flipped version of Dexter's Laboratory (annoying male sibling with super-intelligent sister(s) instead of the opposite).
    • It's because Chris Savino, who directed seasons 3 and 4 of Dexter's Laboratory, worked on Johnny Test as a contributing writer, producer, and director of some episodes.
  • In the Captain Scarlet remake, Seymour Griffiths (Code Name: Lt. Green) is replaced by Serena Lewis (also codenamed Lt. Green).
  • 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).
  • In the 90s cartoon version of Flash Gordon, Flash's ally Prince Thun of the Lion People became Princess Thundar.
  • 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 Appleseed, and Amadeus (as Sally Eri).
  • The CGI Rupert The Bear cartoon flipped Ping Pong and Ferdy Fox into females. Ferdy was also renamed "Frieda".
  • Monsters Vs Aliens features a parody of the cliche old B-movie scene where two teenagers pull into "Lover's Lane" only to stumble across supernatural weirdness, with the gender roles reversed: the girl makes the first move and wants to investigate the crashed alien ship, while the guy is nervous about Their First Time, chickens out, and twists his ankle.

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