Third Law of Gender-Bending

aka: Genderbending Transfers Stereotypes

"What? I'm wearing a skirt, and I have boobs. I'm not going to start worrying about my manly image now!"

— Elliot, El Goonish Shive

Any gender bent character will either embrace or be subject to all of the stereotypes associated with their new gender.

Characters who change sex typically display — or are forced to adopt — gender appropriate dress and behavior. Most of the time this means dresses and makeup for a man turned woman and aggressive and macho behavior for a woman turned man. Frequently rationalized as being due to the characters having stereotypical views of gender roles, particularly when the character in question is depicted as being in need of a lesson in gender equality.

Like the second law, this trope typically manifests in one of three forms:

• A masquerade wherein the character is forced by circumstances to adopt stereotypically masculine or feminine attire or behavior, sometimes under duress. (Commonly found in "Freaky Friday" Flip or similar plots where the character becomes a preexisting person of another sex and must maintain the pretense.) Social mandates such as school or work uniforms may be invoked.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body, wherein the character simply cannot resist adopting stereotypical attire or behavior due to irresistible compulsion, latent desires, Mind Control, biological imperatives, or some combination of all of the above.
• The character was already a Tomboy or In Touch with His Feminine Side, so the way they acted (or wanted to act) before has been made more socially accepted. The second variant may even be assumed, but turn out to be a placebo effect.

More sophisticated applications of this trope will often apply some combination of the above. It may be as simple as characters wanting or needing to "fit in" (or at least not wanting to stick out), wanting to distance themselves from an identity or past behavior they've grown to dislike, or wanting to appear attractive to a potential love interest. Less sophisticated applications simply apply it without question or place the characters in an environment where clothing associated with their former sex simply isn't available.

Since most Gender Bender characters are male-to-female, this frequently results in scenes where the newly minted girl is confronted with all of the requirements of his new sex, which can include skirts, hose, makeup, high heels and other trappings of femininity. This can result in Unfortunate Implications reinforcing stereotypical behavior. Some people may find the notion of underlying biological imperatives enforcing such behavior offensive or simply ridiculous, as nothing about being a woman inherently results in a need to wear the stereotypical outfit.

From a literary perspective, the reason this trope comes up is clear: if an author gender bends a character, and the crew acts normally and maturely until the situation is straightened out, the gender bending didn't really matter, did it? This trope may be applied to ensure that the characters' problems aren't simply solved by crossdressing themselves back to their original sex and then acting like nothing's changed, thus preserving the drama.

This trope may result in Becoming the Mask or Going Native depending upon surrounding circumstances, thus leading into the Second Law of Gender-Bending. May result in a Shopping Montage and/or Makeover Montage as the new boy or girl (willingly or not) gets geared up for life in their new sex.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Ayakashi Triangle: Despite pretending he was always a girl, Matsuri's behavior remains primarily, even brazenly masculine (he doesn't even change his first-person pronoun), but that makes the few feminine traits he displays more noticeable:
  • Literally the only changes to his wardrobe are adding a sports bra and switching the slacks in his school uniform for a skirt (the shirt and blazer are the same design, though he needed a new pair to fit his altered body). However, the girl's school uniform is by far Matsuri's most shown outfit, as most of the manga takes place at or on the way to/from school, and he often forgets to change into his ninja gear when he should. After a few months, Matsuri sometimes wears boyish but distinctly feminine clothes.
  • Discussed when Shirogane first moves in to the Kazamaki household and sees Matsuri serving breakfast:
    Shirogane: You femininity has leveled up so much that you prepare breakfast in an apron! My Gender Swap Awakened in a cruel jutsu.
    Matsuri: It's only me and grandpa, so I was doing these chores even when I was a guy!
  • Getting harassed by guys causes Matsuri to develop some traits of a Sour Prude. When a pair of guys stare at his breasts, Matsuri literally forgets his own gender for a second. In a later incident, he has no reservation browbeating a group of guys for hitting on a female teacher, then insisting she not be lenient on "the boys", as Suzu mentally notes he seems to be forgetting something. He even gets a reflexive moment of Pervert Revenge Mode when an enemy attacks him in the bathroom (contrast to a similar situation in a very early chapter where Matsuri showed no shame running into battle naked).
    Matsuri: (thinking) It’s so obvious where you’re looking. Do they think we can’t tell? Guys are so stupid! Wait, I’m a guy too.
  • At one point, Matsuri is in a rush to distract Suzu with an errand, and randomly blurts out he needs girls' clothes. Though still uncomfortable in anything more than the aforementioned school uniform, Reo's inhibition-loosing Fantastic Drug lets Matsuri enthusiastically fly through an Costume-Test Montage, even as Reo picks out increasingly impractical outfits. Ironically, Matsuri asking in the first place makes Reo and Suzu wonder if his female body is making him act more feminine, and will eventually cause him to identify as a girl.
  • Matsuri eventually switches from a fundoshi to girls' underwear because the ensuing discomfort helps develop his spiritual powers. As a side effect of losing something he treasures so much, he's temporarily rendered very timid and clumsy. The whole thing was his mother's idea, which is rather convenient given she seems to like the idea of having a daughter.
    Matoi: Since you're a boy, you prefer traditional fundoshi! But now you must start wearing panties! You'll feel resistant and experience great discomfort, but those emotions will serve to strengthen your spirit and be far more effective than any ascetic training you might do under a mighty waterfall! This is training only you can do!
• Cheeky Angel: For all of her insistence that she's truly a boy. Megumi shows little male behaviour besides aggressiveness. This is complicated when it's revealed Megumi was originally a girl who wished to be a boy, but could only receive Fake Memories of being one. This delusion became a sort of subconscious excuse to develop personality traits she wanted, but thought were exclusively masculine.
• A mild version can be found in The Day of Revolution: Megumi is not shown wearing any exclusively female clothing outside of her girls' school uniform, but since it is Japan her uniform has to be a stereotypical Sailor Fuku complete with a ridiculously short skirt. She also has her coach/therapist/BFF Motoko constantly reminding her to act more like a girl. Presumably, she only puts up with this because she actually wants to be a girl, she's just riddled with second thoughts and self-doubts whenever she confronts one of the disconcerting aspects of girlhood.
  Motoko: [looming over a prostrate Megumi] ...sooner or later, you're going to be looking up at someone like this.
• Heaven's Lost Property: Tomoki will occasionally use a special device to turn himself into Tomoko so he can act out various shoujo tropes.
• Kanojo ni Naru Hi:
  • Initially played dead straight in the first manga: Mamiya's deep-seated needs to win at all things and always be the master of her emotions causes her to seize femininity with both hands, literally demanding her classmates regard her as a girl when she returns to school. Deconstructed later when she breaks down in front of her chief rival/best friend Miyoshi and reveals her bravado is just a brave front she put up because most of her male self-image was tied up in being the best at physical things she can no longer do thanks to some concealed Gender Bender related health problems.
  • Subverted and then reconstructed in the sequel Kanojo Ni Naru Hi Another when Sagara, who has not publicly re-identified as a girl, is pleased by the effect his schoolgirl "disguise" has on his former rival/newfound love interest Narumi. Be it as a boy or girl, looking attractive to Narumi is uppermost in his mind, though he tries to play it off in classic tsundere fashion by telling himself it's only because skirts are cooler in hot weather.
• Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl: Hazumu was a walking feminine stereotype even before being turned female, and is quick to follow her female friends' advice as how to fit in as a girl. However, she mentions that she prefers male clothing, and occasionally wears them when not in a female school uniform.
• Zig-zagged in Kimo-Ota, Idol Yarutteyo: Yousuke, a teenage Idol Singer Fan Boy, wakes up one day as a girl named Yoko (which is how everyone else remembers "her" always being), and decides to use their now-good looks to become an idol themself. However, despite having such a girly career goal, Yousuke/Yoko is just as masculine as when they were male. Off-stage, they initially didn't wear any feminine clothes besides a school uniform, not even at auditions or training (which makes performing in a short skirt and heels notably awkward). Yoko's bandmate eventually talks them into a Girliness Upgrade as part of dressing more fashionably while on the job, though since Yoko dislikes wearing skirts, she compromises by buying Yoko shorts that look like a skirt.
• One chapter of Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid has Ilulu turn Kobayashi into a man, believing Kobayashi would be so overcome with lust that "he" would have no choice but to take it all out on Ilulu. While Kobayashi acts (and looks) no different than she did before, she notes that she's starting to feel uncomfortably sexual instincts towards Tohru and Kanna, the latter of which terrified her, though she avoids acting on them.
• Played with in Nozomu Nozomi: It's implied that the third law triggered Nozomu's Gender Bender, as he was a crossdresser obsessed with the external trappings of femininity before his inexplicable spontaneous sex change. However, since he's ambivalent about his actual physical sex change and forced to hide it for a full year his occasional forays into girl's clothing remain just as brief and furtive as if he had remained a boy.
• Osananajimi wa Onnanoko ni Naare:
  • Sylphie wants Iori to become Shiori permanently, but Shiori can change back whenever she's confident that she's still a guy. Sylphie thus tries to make Shiori feel more feminine, effecting the Third Law to cause the First. Her methods include forcing Shiori into girly outfits, pushing for her to fall in love with her guy friend, and using a potion that makes Shiori unable to speak in a masculine fashion. The latter is so effective it causes an outright Shapeshifter Mode Lock until it is dispelled.
  • Since Sylphie's trying to fulfill Shuichi's wish for a "cute girl Childhood Friend", Shiori experiences some changes beyond physical sex to better embody his ideal girl. Shuichi likes Cute Clumsy Girls, so Shiori is a much worse athlete than Iori, but a much better cook. Though not specified, this may be why Shiori is considered extremely cute.
• Ranma ½: Ranma doesn't usually act any more feminine in female form than in his male form, to the point he is infamous in-universe for going around in female form wearing nothing but his boxers, but he is quite prone to undermining his own claims of manliness out of opportunism, narcissism, or pure Rule of Funny:
  • Ranma is confident in his looks even as a man, but is particularly vain about how his female form looks. He's complained about P-chan scratching his "perfect skin", gotten enraged at being called ugly, and gloated about having bigger breasts than Akane. In one particularly ridiculous moment in the manga, a spirit imitating his female form says they both look ugly. Ranma tries to prove her wrong by taking the lead as they solict dates from random men off the street.
  • His hypercompetitive nature has repeatedly lead him to prove aptitude at things like cooking, women's gymnastics, selling things to boys via female sex appeal, and cheerleading. Even besides applying general physical abilities, he's quite good at all of them.
  • Initially, Ranma completely hated wearing girls' clothes in female form, though he occasionally ended up in them anyway. Eventually, he becomes very quick to dress up and pretend to be feminine, either as part of a disguise or to take advantage of people who don't know his true nature. He typically overdoes it, becoming a loud Fake Cutie, implying that he's consciously trying to act out stereotypes.
  • When he hits his head in one episode and thinks he was always a girl, he becomes the epitome of this trope. The formerly brash, violent, loud-mouthed, hot-tempered and coarse boy becomes very polite, even-tempered, claims to be a pacifist who hates violence, faints at the sight of blood, and is so submissive that she is willing to let Happosai grope her naked bosom because he starts throwing a tantrum when she initially refuses to let him do so and hides behind Akane when he tries his usual perversions. Everyone around Ranma comments that this behavior is completely unlike the normal Ranma.
• The Sailor Starlights in Sailor Moon: Sailor Stars were originally female, but despite their male civilian identities nominally being disguises, they act masculine to various degrees whenever in those forms, even in private (more than in the manga, where they were just crossdressing women instead of physically changing sex). This could just be that their original personalities weren't conventionally feminine, but Seiya in particular seems rather enthusiastic about being a guy, even telling Usagi that a rivalry with a male football player is "something girls can't understand".
• Sekainohate de Aimashou: To begin with, Ryouma was a timid, effeminate boy skilled in domestic tasks since his mother died. After he was turned female, it's frequently emphasized that he would make a good wife, and he becomes much more emotional, especially when it comes to crying. Despite a brief initial attempt to pass as a boy, it's pretty much all skirts and dresses from then on, and everybody seems to accept it without comment.
• To Love Ru: Most of the time Rito is turned into a girl, he ends up being forcibly dressed in something feminine and/or revealing. The first time, Mikan and Lala try to dress Rito up in Lala's spare clothes, and he runs away when Mikan pulls out a frilly bra. That eventually just leads to Saki, Rin, and Aya (who assume he's a stranger) throwing away his male clothes while he's unconscious, then shoving him in lingerie and a racy evening gown once he wakes up. In the following incidents, Lala puts him in a low-neck blouse with a miniskirt then a French Maid outfit, Momo makes him join some girls dressed up as Hospital Hotties, and Nemesis uses her shapeshifting powers to turn his school uniform into a girl's one.
  I... it's over... I held out as long as I could, but I'm in girly panties now...
• An extremely subtle example in Vandread: the character that displays the most blatant Femme Fatale/Lady of War body language is eventually revealed to be a gender-bent mole. She often looks like she's posing like a runway model because that's exactly what she's doing.
• In The World God Only Knows, during a "Freaky Friday" Flip, we see The Protagonist start leaning to the "dark side of gaming" (playing Dating Sims... for girls!) and behaving more and more feminine (thanks partly to the Weiss that initiated the flip). We also see the girl he switched with start acting more like a boy, although in her case it's largely down to the Masquerade of maintaining his life. Later on in the story, however, she becomes a Bifauxnen because she is comfier looking and dressing up as a guy.

Comic Strips

• In a FoxTrot story arc (playing off of The Metamorphosis), Jason dreams of waking up transformed into a girl. He panics at first, but soon experiences desires to go shopping and enjoying the Backstreet Boys. Justified, as we see that Jason has a childish view of girls (which makes sense, as he is a child).
  • And, he didn't know it was Backstreet Boys music until after he'd started liking it; the realization made him do a Catapult Nightmare.

Fan Works

• Navarone tries to avert this which gender swapped in Diaries of a Madman, but circumstances tend to conspire against him. Particularly when he gets taken captive by the monkeys and is forced into wearing various dresses.
• Zigzagged in the Happy Days fanfiction Happy Daze, where Fonzie turns into a girl named Francie. She still wears pants, but she also wears a scalloped blouse and changes into a dress and makeup when she's being formal. She does still fix cars and rides a motorcycle, but she's expected to be politer and more "ladylike".
• In the Rugrats fanfiction Tommy's Change, Tommy turns into a girl from eating a strange blue worm. Lil tells him to always wear a dress and play with only "girl toys", even though Tommy in the fanfiction itself points out that some females in the actual show wear pants, and (though this was not pointed out) Rugrats generally has the mentality that there's no such thing as girl and boy toys.
• In Lost Together, Ranma gets locked in female shape then suffers amnesia so when the people met by "Ranko" encourage her to dress feminine and learn things such as cooking and sewing, she goes along because she cannot remember being anything else and wants to fit in. She first feels rather awkward — and wonders what it could mean about her past — but ultimately grows quite comfortable as a somewhat boyish young woman.

Films — Live-Action

• In All of Me, while the heroine is technically sharing a body with the male protagonist, when he falls "asleep" during a court scene, she has to pretend to be him during cross-examination. Her attempts to act male include, but are not limited to, widening her shoulders as much as possible, deepening her voice to ridiculous extents, and even pausing to spit into a non-existent spittoon.
• In the Italian movie Le Comiche 2, after a male individual accidentally undergoes an undesired breast augmentation, he is discovered wearing a rather provocative black bra under male clothing. After suffering an equally undesired sexual reassignment surgery, she becomes an odalisque, wearing typical skimpy clothing, performing belly dancing and sexually satisfying her master as favorite in the harem.

Literature

• Initially played straight in Justin Lieber's Beyond Rejection as required by a masquerade; justified later when it's revealed that the "masquerade" was actually part of an artificially-induced therapeutic dream intended to enable the protagonist to adapt to an involuntary Gender Bender.
• The Belgariad: In Belgarath the Sorcerer, the narrator/protagonist says that the one time he transformed himself into a female animal he found it rather disconcerting because of the "extra internal organs" and "those strange chemicals in the blood", but refused to go into any further details.
• In the novel Girl by David Thomas, Bradley Barker (the main character) goes into hospital to have his wisdom teeth removed and is given a sex-change operation by mistake. The change is permanent and the main character does get used to being a woman through typical dress and actions, but the novel is surprisingly respectful of the transgender topic despite the comedic plot set-up.
• The Marvelous Land of Oz: After Tip is turned back into Princess Ozma, he instantly transforms from a fairly rambunctious boy to an exceedingly Girly Girl. However, given the date of publication (1903), it's highly unlikely anything else would have been considered acceptable. Fan Fic occasionally explains this by making the Ozma personality into a mask that Tip put on for the sake of the people.
  • Later writers in the Oz Mythos have also addressed this question in novels and short stories, including The Disenchanted Princess of Oz by Melody Grandy, The Mysterious Chronicles Of Oz by Onyx Madden, and Ozma Sees Herself by Edward Einhorn. These works all take advantage of the apparent time gap between The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz to insert an interquel that covers Ozma coming to terms with her transformation.
  • The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Anime adaptation, on the other hand, takes a pragmatic approach by depicting Ozma as a rambunctious Tomboy Princess, allowing her to be comfortable as a girl without the unsettling Loss of Identity implications of the original.
  • Finally, the Marvel Comics graphic versions of the novels have the script hew closely to the original text, but take advantage of the graphic format to show Ozma tries to act feminine, but does not instantly know how. Some of her expressions are just priceless.
• Piers Anthony's works frequently include gender-bending, usually accompanied by this trope. He tends to write natural laws into his settings which force certain behaviors and responses onto characters based on their physical sexes. Several of his books also combine this with I'm a Man; I Can't Help It. A female will turn into a male and learn that males are such virile creatures possessed with such strong libido they must constantly struggle to contain those urges and not turn into rapists. Some specific examples:
  • In And Eternity, Orlene is transformed into a man and immediately becomes an aggressive, misogynistic, testosterone-charged boor, attempting to rape her friend Jolie. Upon having her female form restored, she and Jolie are horrified and conclude that "Men have passions that women do not", and that the reason all men are not constantly overwhelmed with violent lust is that "they have learned control". However, this one is justified in-universe: The "goddess" doing this explains that she is demonstrating the effects of a Hereditary Curse which causes such bestial behavior in a male victim.
  • Crewel Lye in which a male character and a female one switch bodies. The former woman is overcome by hormones and can't resist planting a kiss on her old body. She concludes that men just can't help their piggish instincts, and gains a new respect for the male character when she realizes how restrained he has been.
• Discworld: Gladys the golem from Going Postal and Making Money. Golems are sexless beings but are normally addressed with male pronouns as a courtesy. The golem responsible for cleaning the women's restroom was renamed Gladys and given female clothing to ensure propriety. Over the course of the books she starts adopting more and more female traits.
• The depiction in Princess Holy Aura is very subtle, given this isn't the type of story to indulge in broad gender-based clichés or humor. However, even though Holly is at first uncomfortable at being in the girls' locker room during PE class, she's soon acclimated enough to act naturally feminine in such stereotypical situations as going on a date.
• Jack Chalker's River of Dancing Gods series literally has variation 2 written right into the physical laws of its universe. The one character who resists is desperately unhappy.
• Despite being a serial Gender Bender herself, Hildy Johnson, the protagonist of John Varley's Steel Beach insists that there are still "girl things" and "boy things" when it comes to dress and behavior, because otherwise there would be little point in changing gender in the first place. This serves to underscore that Easy Sex Change has become so easy in Hildy's world (you can get a sex change in a beauty shop or a tattoo parlor) that some people are willing to change sex just to facilitate a relationship or even just to suit their clothes.
• Virginia Woolf had...strong but hard to codify opinions about gender expression, but they result in Orlando getting very feminine 'naturally' after his/her gender-bend.
  • After leaving the gypsies, of course. Which is a research goof, since the Rom tend to have serious taboos associated with womanhood, and a Romany encampment is not the best place to be if you're menstruating for the first time at thirty.

Live-Action TV

• Charmed (1998) plays with this when Prue is turned into a man in order to track down a succubus. She dresses like a man and attempts to copy Dan's posture in order to appear masculine, which is a conscious choice on her part. But as the day goes on, she starts feeling more aggressive and has an instinctive reaction to the word "impotent," culminating in declaring herself a full man after she reflexively punches another man in the face. Piper chews her out for defining masculinity as aggressive and violent, pointing out that Dan isn't either of those things.
• Degrassi: The Next Generation features an inversion when Adam, after briefly and uncomfortably de-transitioning, burns his last remaining girls' clothing with family and friends present.
• Doctor Who: The Master, after regenerating into a female incarnation, changes her name to "the Mistress" (Missy for short) and insists on being addressed as Time Lady rather than Time Lord, explaining that she considers herself old-fashioned. She also proceeds to dress like a gothic Mary Poppins and plays up her high heels and frills for everything they're worth, including a Yandere attitude towards the Doctor that would make most yanderes blush.
• A demi-version: Chandler, of Friends spends time quitting smoking using a hypnosis tape while he sleeps. "You are a strong, confident woman who does not need to smoke". Over the course of the episode, Chandler becomes more stereotypically feminine. He puts on chapstick like lipstick, blotting off the excess. He starts throwing like a girl. He interrupts himself to compliment Rachel on a "stunning blouse". Of course, Chandler was metrosexual and the stunning blouse wasn't entirely out of character even before the hypnosis.
  Chandler: Well, don't we look pretty, all dressed up.
• Gene/Jean, the supposedly male/female "transmute" in Quark: the whole transition from "Gene" to "Jean" consisted entirely of a shift from masculine stereotypical behaviors to feminine stereotypical behaviors, since no visible physical transformation actually took place.
• In the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Profit and Lace", Quark (the male Ferengi bartender) has to be surgically changed into a female Ferengi. Soon after she completes the transformation, she finds herself taking on every stereotype of female behavior — not as part of an act, but because her new hormones now rule her psyche. (Apparently, Ferengi females are ruled by the same emotions as human females — although Ferengi do have a very sexist society.)
• David Walliams plays a transvestite in Little Britain who is compelled to take it very seriously and over-exaggerate femininity to the point where it becomes excruciatingly embarrassing to watch. It doesn't help he is also choosing to character-act a genteel Edwardian lady and wears styles which are quite a lot of decades out of date,
  I'm a Lady!

Visual Novels

• Played with in Max's Big Bust: A Captain Nekorai Tale. Max gets turned into a girl and then gets forced to work in Coffee Shrine, but this is only because of her huge tab there. Her male partner is also forced to work there through the use of a temporary Gender Bender potion. Other than that, Max is never really forced into any stereotypical feminine behavior. It probably helps that all of Max's female friends are nerdy lesbians.

Webcomics

• A major driving point in the furry webcomic Beyond the Veil, in which the attractive, busty young rat girl is in fact the latest body for a deposed intergalactic emperor. "She" takes to her new body very well, more than happy to have her similarly body-riding male second-in-command as a lover, with a lot of privileges.
• Eerie Cuties:
  • Zig-zagged when Ace was turned into a girl for a few weeks, and was shocked to discover he had become been attracted to guys, wasn't even aroused at a girl kissing him on the lips, and enjoyed dressing up like a girl and getting a makeover. The school nurse explains that changing his sex also changed his sexual orientation. The rest? That's all on him.
  • When Ace's curse is transferred to Kade, he also becomes quite adept at women's fashion, not to mention high-strung and clingy.
    Melissa: Fine. One date. We'll see where things go from there.
    female!Kade: Squeee! You've made me such a happy guy, Melissaaa!
    Melissa: If you still think of yourself as a guy, why are you wearing a dress?
    female!Kade: It matched these shoes that were just to die for! And it makes my butt look cute!
• El Goonish Shive has Grace's Birthday Party arc, part-masquerade where the various characters deliberately chose stereotypical outfits for each other in keeping with the 'walk a mile in my shoes' theme of the occasion.
  • Susan starts acting macho and aggressive immediately after becoming male. It's transient, however: losing an arm-wrestling contest with the still-female Nanase is enough to snap her out of it. Sarah points out that Susan's reaction was more her being herself, just over a different subject.
    • Tedd does note that the first time gender-bending, their new genders' thoughts are exaggerated, which played a part in everyone's storyline during the event, but the only one whose gender-bending mental state was a major plot point was Susan, as it helped her recognize her hangups with men.
  • Later, when Elliot develops the power to morph his clothes and appearance along with his gender his female forms tend to end up wearing girly outfits because he apparently just can't help visualizing them that way.
    • Possibly(?) Justified. It's later suggested that Elliot might be some form of non-binary (indifferent to gender), as he doesn't personally recognize the difference between "man" and "woman" as gender identities beyond the fact that other people say they exist, and thus his definitions of genders are largely shaped by media representation and the behavior of others.
  • Grace has fewer dresses and skirts in her wardrobe than Tedd does despite most of her first clothes being selected by Ordinary High-School Student Sarah. He even prides himself on how sexy he looks transformed, and claims he cooks better while female out of habit.
    • Justified to some extent with the revelation that Tedd is gender-fluid.
  • Exaggerated with Ellen Magus, who comes from a much higher-magic world where, among other things, permanent gender-change spells are readily available. One effect of this is that people who wish to pursue an occupation stereotypically associated with the opposite gender will often switch genders. Ellen himself, for example, was born female, but was interested in a career as a Kung-Fu Wizard and so decided to switch to male for the enhanced physical strength.
• The Good Witch: Playing with the third law is just one of the ways Angel torments her victims. Examples include making sure all of her older brother's transformations include uber-girly clothes, turning one classmate into a cheerleader (complete with outfit) and possibly turning another into an enthusiastic transvestite. However, the third law is also played straight with Angel herself, who, as a former male-to-female transgender person, is absolutely thrilled to finally be able to buy the dress she always wanted. Since she can (and does) magically create any clothing she wants at will actually buying the dress appears to have been an act of affirmation on her part.
• Played with in I Dream of a Jeanie Bottle: Jean's I Dream of Jeannie-inspired powers means her clothing reverts to the iconic I Dream Of Jeannie harem girl outfit whenever she reverts to her base genie form and circumstances always seem to be forcing her to "girlify" her outfit even when she changes it into something else. However, she's also shown experimenting with stereotypical female outfits (Sailor Moon, Kim Possible, and Rogue) in a G-rated Man, I Feel Like a Woman sequence.
• The T-Girls of the Jet Dream Remix Comic, being Action Girls, retain many traditionally "masculine" traits. But because the T-Girls are often covert operatives, they have been extensively trained in all aspects of "feminine behavior." It's not purely professional, however — for the most part, the T-Girls seem to enjoy their new female roles.
• Misfile: Ash hates acting feminine, generally only making minimal concessions that are either enforced biologically (periods, bras) or culturally (bathing suits, a bridesmaid dress). He doesn't hesitate to complain about it, either, in ways that make it plain it fuels his fear of assimilation, and he maintains his interest in his main "masculine" pursuits, electronic gaming and amateur street racing. Ash's mother, however, is doing her utmost to enforce this trope, including roping Ash into a modeling event. Ash referred to seeking her help picking out a bridesmaid dress as "a deal with the powers of darkness."
• Both averted and played straight in The Order of the Stick. When Roy dons the Belt of Gender Bending, he is almost immediately hit on by both the dwarf assassin sent to kill him and by Belkar (who knows it's actually Roy but hits on him anyway to make him uncomfortable), and even Haley makes wisecracks at his expense. However, when offered the chance to either change back or stay a woman, he admits that it wasn't as bad as he'd expected going into it.
• Sailor Sun: Bay is forced to dress as a Magical Girl for her acting job and later forced to act as a surrogate mother for two successive Kids From The Future. It's worth noting that Bay was turned into a woman because the production crew wanted him/her to play a boy turned into a magical girl.
• Spiderwebs uses variation one: After an ill-considered wish turns the protagonist into a girl she returns home to discover her bedroom redecorated and all of her clothes replaced by a "helpful" pooka.
• The Wotch: It's made explicit in the case of the four Jerk Jocks who got turned into cheerleaders (The Wotch, Cheer!) where it's flat-out stated that the four primarily acted like macho jerks to repress their fundamentally kind and gentle (i.e. "feminine") inner natures
  • Although Cheer! does at least expand their personalities and shows that Alex retains a rather masculine love of war, guns, and battle strategies and Lita is if anything even more of a diehard gamer, which implies that Sam's and Jo's primary interests (cooking and Magical Girl anime) carried over as well. The cheerleaders in The Wotch appeared to simply be stereotypical girly-girls.

Web Original

• It happens in most of the stories on the TG-transformation fiction site Fictionmania, willingly or not.
• This happens a lot in stories in the Transsexuals and Crossdressers section of erotic fiction platform Literotica, though it's usually superficial stuff like buying dresses.
• Explored in enough depth to constitute an entire subplot in Magical Girl Policy. The need to maintain the Masquerade and go undercover as a cheerleader means Robynne gets dragged kicking and screaming (figuratively, anyway, she's too introverted to actually be that demonstrative) into a crash-course Girliness Upgrade involving shoes, clothing, lingerie, and makeup. Fortunately, her fellow Spirit Guards are largely sympathetic to her desire to tone down her spectacular looks to avoid unwanted male attention, though her Unwitting Muggle Friend Stacy has other ideas. She also has to learn to live with the permanent waist-length bangs hairstyle that comes part and parcel with her Magical Girl Warrior powers but is at least spared the cost and effort of maintaining it.
• In the Paradise setting, humans are randomly, permanently changed into Funny Animals (with some experiencing a gender-change at the same time). Some of these stories feature involuntarily feminized characters receiving a Girliness Upgrade (because The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body) and throwing themselves into it all the way.
• Take a Lemon actually combines variation 1 and 2: not only do the circumstances of his Gender Bender force Marsh to adopt a masquerade it turns out his alternate universe Distaff Counterpart doesn't own any pants as unlikely as that seems.
• The Gender Bender characters of the Whateley Universe display the full range of this trope. They are expected to keep up a Hide Your Gays masquerade while at the titular school for the safety of the LGBTI students at Poe cottage, which the school justifies as a sensible precaution after an MTF student was murdered by her homophobic boyfriend. However, the degree to which individual students actually participate reflects the degree to which they were (knowingly or unknowingly) transgender before their change, the degree of their change, their degree of acceptance afterwards, and/or their confidence in their ability to defend themselves.
  • Chaka, Generator and Lancer (who were all transgender before they changed) are all examples of the trope played straight.
  • Fey (who has a female spirit in her head helping her to become feminine) is an example of the justified version of the trope.
  • Bladedancer is a double subversion: She is fully female but dresses as close to boyish as she can get away with in what amounts to a Superhero School with prep school clothing rules. On the other hand, she now listens to some of the music her girlfriend Molly likes (in addition to still liking what she listened to as a boy) and appears to be gradually (if not enthusiastically) adjusting.
  • Fully subverted by Phase, who receives a girl's figure and proceeds to fight tooth and nail against it (despite his guardians' insistence that he embrace the change). Phase still has male genitalia and goes out of his way to announce his still-a-male-ness to everyone he meets, even though events tend to conspire to force him to pretend to be a girl. Phase's mutation got him thrown out of his Knight Templar family of Noble Bigots and Heteronormative Crusaders so it's possible he doesn't reject the change so much as he just hates himself.
  • Jobe Wilkins plays the biological imperative concept straight. He designed his current female form as a fantasy girlfriend intending to inflict it on somebody else. While Jobe still claims to want the Gender Bender reversed it's also apparent that "she" is also gradually falling prey to the biological imperatives "he" programmed into herself.
  • Ribbon deliberately follows this trope - mostly - especially regarding clothing, on the belief that if she's going to start over fresh, she may as well make the most of it.
  • Finally there's Tennyo, who is bound to a Time Abyss Humanoid Weapon of Mass Destruction; she just doesn't seem to care (and is so powerful she doesn't really have to). Similarly, there is Carmilla, a half-human, half-Eldritch Abomination demigoddess whose original male form was a disguise imposed on her at birth. Neither of them really have a human viewpoint anymore, so they do just follow gender expectations enough to avoid drawing unwanted attention.

Western Animation

• Inverted in an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold where Batwoman switches her mind with Batman's. Being transferred into a man's body makes Batwoman go from somewhat feminine to absurdly Campy and effeminate. Batman, meanwhile, acts the same in either body.
• In The Fairly OddParents!, when Timmy wishes to be a girl to be able to hang out with Trixie and find out what she wants, he gets the irresistible urge to watch soap operas and buy shoes—although he already did that first one before the gender-bend. He maintains his urge to read comic books like "Skull Squisher". ...because of the Fanservice. "Muscular guys in spandex fighting crime, cool!" Timmy also makes Cosmo and Wanda switch sexes while he's out: Wanda changes from a stressed-out Only Sane Man into a surly Fat Slob. Cosmo goes from a careless idiot to a vain Hysterical Woman.
• Futurama:
  • Zig-zagged in "Bend Her": fembot!Bender embraces his idea of what a woman should be—basically, slutty—but Calculon recognizes this as making her "one of the boys." Interestingly, he finds this attractive and falls in love with "her". Later, it's stated the robot equivalent of sex hormones are making Bender more "feminine" (demonstrated when he insists on putting a coaster under a drink), which mostly makes him empathetic enough to worry that his scam will hurt Calculon.
  • In the episode "Neutopia", the guys eagerly act girly and giggly when their genders get flipped by a Sufficiently Advanced Alien. When the girls-turned-guys force them to make a swimsuit calendar, they enjoy it a lot more than the real girls did when the real guys forced them to take cheesecake pictures.
• In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, in the episode "Trading Faces", Jimmy and Cindy trade bodies through a freak accident. After they're stuck that way long enough, their bodies start making their minds more like the one original in them, which manifests in an unusually "girly" outburst from Jimmy-in-Cindy's body.
• In The Loud House episode "One of the Boys", Lincoln has a dream where his sisters have turned into boys. The boys are all mean and fart a lot, even though only three of his real sisters fart a lot and only three of them are a bit abrasive (and even those three aren't really mean). Then, in the dream, Lincoln turns into a girl and is seen wearing a dress and hairclip, having long hair, and having a pink-decorated room.
• One episode of The Penguins of Madagascar centered on a purely psychosomatic example: A faulty DNA test convinces Skipper he's a female. At first, he thinks it won't interfere with his job, but then he does things like wait for the others to open the door for him and - horror of horrors! - ask for directions. So he quits the team, puts on a pink bow and moves in with Marlene, who is not amused with his outdated ideas of femininity.

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