Single Sex Offspring

Sarah: All the kids here are boys.
Martha: Patrick only has boys.

— Martha Marcy May Marlene

A family or group that is known for producing only sons or daughters, sometimes over the course of multiple generations. The reasons may be magical in nature, unknown or examples of Artistic License – Biology, and when there is an exception to this rule this individual tends to be important. While uncommon in Real Life, this trope is actually Truth in Television.

Compare Single Line of Descent, which has a series of only children that are usually all male due to Lineage Comes from the Father, and Resentful Outnumbered Sibling, where one sibling out of a group dislikes that their other siblings are the opposite sex. Contrast with One-Gender Race, when a species simply doesn't have any members of a different sex. Recurrent instances of this may result in Gender Rarity Value.

Contrast Bizarre Alien Sexes and Queer as Tropes for scenarios where more than two genders or sexes are involved. See also Hereditary Twinhood, which is where multiple births run in families (which can sometimes overlap with this trope).

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• In Dance in the Vampire Bund members of the Tepes family, who are vampire royalty, only produce daughters. Late in the manga we find out there's actually a very good reason for this: The Tepes women were all sired by the Darkness on the original vampire Queen, but none of them until Mina was actually fertile so when a new one was needed she was simply taken out of stasis. The reason for the Strong Family Resemblance between all of the Queens is that they were all sisters.
• In Gundam Wing the Winner family has 29 daughters and a single son, protagonist Quatre. All of them were test tube babies due to the difficulty early space colonists had with natural births except him, since his mother insisted on carrying him and giving birth naturally and suffered Death by Childbirth for it.
• In Kamisama Kiss Nanami's family only gives birth to girls, and only a single girl each generation due to a curse/blessing started from Yukiji that can only end when a girl of their line and Tomoe fall in love again. This makes the finale even more significant when it shows the child Nanami has is a boy, indicating that the curse's conditions have been fulfilled.
• The Jenius family of Macross fame have at least seven daughters and no sons. This possibly extends to the next generation as their only known grandchild, Mirage, is also a girl.
• The Ranma ½ second Non-Serial Movie Nihao My Concubine revolves around the Traveling Landmass Togenkyo, an island which houses a magical spring that turns any living creature touched by its water into a human man, regardless of its original sex or species. The problem is that this spring contaminates the other water sources on the island, and as a result, women who reside there can only give birth to male children. Consequently, Togenkyo is forced to raid ships and islands, kidnapping a fresh supply of new women to become spouses for the male residents and ensure the population survives.
• In The Rose of Versailles Reynier de Jarjayes had six daughters and no sons. Because of this he decided to have his youngest daughter Oscar Raised as the Opposite Gender.
• In Twin Star Exorcists for the last thousand years, Abe no Seimei's children are all male, since they are spawned from her yang energy, while the female half of the titular exorcists is born from her rival Doman Ashiya's bloodline.
• The first "season" of World's End Harem reveals that most children born after the MK virus wiped out nearly all male humans were female. Any attempts to create baby boys from alternative birthing options (save regular heterosexual sex) only resulted in more girls or a very rare but terminally ill boy.
• In Your Name, the Miyamizu are a matrilineal bloodline who apparently produce only daughters, all of whom are implied to have had body swap experiences.
• In YuYu Hakusho the Ice Maidens reproduce via parthenogenesis and are all female. When Hiei, a male, is born after his mother became intimate with a fire demon, he's thrown off their floating island to die. This was also the fate of all male children before him, but he managed to survive.

Comic Books

• In Fables Snow and Rose's family had a generational trait that meant they only had girls. Their mother Lauda was the youngest of thirteen sisters. Unfortunately a family curse compelled them to make it so There Can Be Only One daughter who inherited the family’s magic, resulting in them all trying to kill each other.

Fanfics

• A major source of tension in Bequeathed from Pale Estates for the Targaryen loyalists, since the last surviving princess from this bloodline has married Oberyn Martell — who's infamous for his sexual appetite leading him to sire eight bastards, none of them being boys. As only sons can hope to take the Iron Throne, the loyalists are left praying for their princess to defy the odds — literally for Lord Velaryon who won't stop attending mass. Hints scattered through the narrative hint at it working, to Oberyn and the other Martell' sheer bafflement.
• A Song of Ice, Fire and Heart has Sansa fretting about giving nothing but daughters to her husband after marrying in the royal family, when the Seven Kingdoms are expecting for the Queen to bear sons. When her septa attempts to comfort her by claiming it won't happen, Sansa reminds her that Oberyn Martell fathered eight children and Jory Cassel five, and all of them were girls.

Films — Animated

• In The Little Mermaid (1989), King Triton has seven daughters (including Ariel) and no sons.
• Prince Hans of Frozen (2013) is the youngest of thirteen sons.

Films — Live-Action

• Martha Marcy May Marlene: Apparently enforced, though we don't find out how or even why. Cult leader Patrick "only has boys". We don't find out if he has daughters and what happens to the girls.
• Mustang: The younger generation of the family is made up of the five sisters. The lack of male influence in their generation leads to them being controlled by their uncles after their parents' deaths.
• Paranormal Activity: It's mentioned in the second film that Hunter is the first son born to Katie's and Kristi's family in several generations. His great-grandmother is part of a cult which sacrifices the firstborn son to a demon, which is why the demon targets him.
• Penelope (2006): A witch places a curse on a family so that the next daughter born will have the face of a pig. Every branch of the family goes on to have only sons for several generations, until the titular character finally fulfills the curse.
• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers: The Pontipee boys (Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank & Gideon) don't have any sisters.

Literature

• The Accursed Kings: It's noted that the royal family of France had always produced enough heirs (King Phillip IV alone had three sons) to prevent a Succession Crisis, so when all three of those sons inherit the crown one after the other and still die without male issue (only Phillip V had a son, but he died in infancy) it causes a crisis like no other in living memory, as the only available candidates are the king's nephew (an amiable incompetent) and his grandson (who is English), leading to the Hundred Years' War.
• Ascendance of a Bookworm: Past a certain point of the story, the protagonist is passed off as the formerly Sent Into Hiding daughter of a noble family. The family in question seems to be extremely prone to producing boys, starting with the paternal grandfather:
  • The aforementioned grandfather sometimes refers to the protagonist as "his only granddaughter".
  • Per her official lineage, she has three older full brothers and a younger paternal half-brother via Exotic Extended Marriage.
  • She goes to Wizarding School at the same time as a cousin with whom she officially shares her paternal grandfather. The cousin is male and the child of her official father's paternal half-brother.
• In the Chronicles of Prydain, the royal family of Llyr seems to produce only daughters. Princess Eilonwy herself says that hers are "the people of Llyr Half-Speech, the Sea King," but for at least the last several generations, the line has been strictly matrilineal with no known male offspring. Princess Angharad, Eilonwy's mother, ran away from the family castle to marry against her own mother's wishes, and died when Eilonwy was too small to remember her; Eilonwy is said to be the last surviving descendant of the House of Llyr.
• The Dark Artifices: Kieran has 50 brothers and no sister. Apparently, the Unseelie King never conceived a daughter. He actually did, and said daughter was in fact his eldest, the fabled "First Heir". She ran away to marry a Shadowhunter, which shamed the King so much that he decreed any future daughter he had would be killed.
• In The Diamond Girls, Sue Diamond has four daughters and only has a son after unexpectedly getting pregnant about ten years after having her last daughter. And then it turns out that her fifth child is a daughter as well, though she spends most of the novel hiding this from disappointment and embarrassment, as she was so sure she was having a boy. Martine, the eldest daughter, becomes pregnant and the family speculates she could have a son, though they don't know either way.
• In Discworld female children are rare among the Nac Mac Feegle. These girls become Keldas, leaders of Nac Mac Feegle clans. The fact that they're a lot smarter (and saner) than most of the men helps too.
• The Enchantment Emporium: The Gale family tends to have 6-9 girls for every boy; and the boys usually aren't firstborn. The main character has only a brother, with no sisters.
• In Firebird Trilogy, the Angelo royal line of Netaia has born only daughters for several generations (men marrying into the line take the name). This turns out to be a Checkovs Gun: the genetic disorder that causes this arose among the telepathic Ehretans, and is the first hint that a lost Ehretan lineage interbred with the Angelo line.
• In Harry Potter, Word of God says that Ginny is the first daughter born to the Weasley family in several generations. She has six older brothers, and her father was one of three brothers.
• In Heavy Object, Major Frolaytia uses her military career to avoid being forced into an Arranged Marriage by her family. Women of her family are desirable brides because of a "special ability" that they are extemely fertile and any children they have are almost always male.
• In InCryptid, dragon princesses are thought to be a One-Gender Race, but they turn out to be female dragons. They can only produce males if they mate with a male, but are able to reproduce by parthenogenesis if none are available.
• For the Ingalls family of Little House on the Prairie fame, four daughters lived to adulthood – Mary, Laura, Carrie, and Grace – but no male child ever survived past infancy. This was true both in real life and in the TV series (son Albert, who only existed on the show, was adopted).
• Little Women: The March family has four daughters, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy, and no sons. When Jo eventually marries Friedrich Bhaer, they have two sons, Rob and Teddy, and no daughters.
• Night World: In the backstory, Hunter Redfern married Maeve Harman both as part of an alliance and in order to get a male heir, but they ended up having four daughters before separating because they couldn't stand each other. Hunter tweaked the inheritance laws so that the descendants of his eldest daughter Garnet could carry the Redfern name, though the family remains patriarchal. It turns out in Black Dawn that Hunter did have one son, Chervil, from a previous marriage, but after they quarrelled Chervil disowned his father and took off by himself to found his own dynasty.
• The Ordinary Princess: For unstated reasons, but presumably because of magic, the Phantasmoranian royal family only births girls. This means the heir apparent is the youngest son of the king's eldest daughter.
  Our royal family always has princesses.
• Pact: The DuChamp Practicioner family has enchanted their bloodline to only ever produce girls. This is largely because the way the family increases its standing among the Practicioner community is through Arranged Marriage, marrying their daughters to powerful, influential Practicioners. The only known case of a son being born to the family was when one of them was married to a priest of Dionysus, whose god's power over fertility overrode the DuChamps' enchantments.
• Played for Drama to some extent in Pride and Prejudice. Mr and Mrs Bennet have five daughters but no sons. As a result, upon Mr Bennet's death his estate will be inherited by a cousin, Mr Collins, due to inheritance laws of the time period favoring men, and there's concern over what will happen to his daughters. Mrs Bennet is extremely keen they all make good marriages to secure their futures.
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Only female witches are known, and they appear to just be magical humans, gaining witch status through inheritance; but whether witches can only have female children, or whether male children are just not noted, is unknown.
• In Septimus Heap, the Heaps have only had sons for several generations, and the lone daughter, Jenna, is adopted.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • In the backstory, Rhaenyra Targaryen had five sons, Jaecaerys, Lucerys, Joffrey, Aegon and Viserys. She gave birth to one daughter, Visenya, but unfortunately the baby was stillborn. Rhaenyra was devastated by the loss of her only daughter, and blamed the stillbirth on her stepmother and half-siblings for stealing her throne. She did however have two stepdaughters whom she appeared fond of (such as betrothing them to her two eldest sons and heirs).
  • Oberyn Martell in the present day has eight children by five different woman. All of these children are female.
• In The Thorn Birds, Meggie is the only daughter of the Cleary family, with three younger brothers and five older brothers. In conversation with the priest, her mother Fiona notes that both her husband's family and her own tend to produce sons more frequently than daughters. "Girls are unusual."

Live Action TV

• Las Aparicio: The titular Aparicio family only has female children, and any men they marry mysteriously die early deaths.
• Both Mike and Carol from The Brady Bunch only had children of their own genders in their previous marriages. Mike had three sons (Peter, Greg, and Bobby) while Carol had three daughters (Marcia, Jan, and Cindy).
• Charmed (1998): Ever since Melinda Warren in the 17th Century the Halliwell family has exclusively had daughters which leads to a great deal of surprise when Piper's first child turns out to be a boy. Her second child is also a boy while the third is a girl. The Distant Epilogue to the series, and the follow-up comics, establish that Phoebe has three daughters while Paige has twin girls and adopts a son.
• Dallas: The Ewing family's three main children are all sons— J.R. (Larry Hagman), Bobby (Patrick Duffy), and Gary (David Ackroyd, and later Ted Shackelford [the latter of those two would be Gary on spinoff Knots Landing from 1979-93]).
• In How I Met Your Mother, the Eriksen family is said to only have male offspring. During the last season, Marshall becomes the first Eriksen in a long time to have a daughter.
• In the I Love Lucy episode where Lucy gives birth to Little Ricky, Ricky and Fred chat with a man who is expecting his seventh child, with all six of the previous ones being girls. After his wife gives birth and the nurse tells him, "We have a surprise for you this time," he's ecstatic about finally having a boy, only to approach the window and learn his wife gave birth to triplets! All girls.
  Fred: Hey, at least you can start your own girl's softball team!
• Jane the Virgin: According to Jane, her family only has daughters (evidenced by how the only maternal relatives we see are her mother Xo, her grandmother Alba, her great-aunt Cecilia, and Cecilia's granddaughter Catalina), so Jane doesn't even bother thinking of a masculine name for the child she accidentally conceived with Rafael. It turns out to be a son, prompting some Last-Minute Baby Naming.
• Malcolm in the Middle: The central family of the series, the Wilkersons, are remarkable for the fact that all of their children are boys: Francis, Reese, Malcolm, Dewey and Jamie. The final episode of the series concludes with the revelation that the mother, Lois, is pregnant again, but we never learn what gender this unborn child is.
• My Three Sons: The titular Douglas brothers (Mike, Robbie & Chip) are raised by their father, grandfather & great-uncle. Another brother, Ernie, is eventually adopted. Later, Robbie & his wife have triplets - all boys. The only females in the family are wives and one stepdaughter, no blood relatives at all.
• The Reed Sisters. Four girls, albeit with boyish nicknames to satisfy their father who hoped for at least one boy. Their mother herself has a brief fantasy of what life would have been like had she had four boys instead. Even the half-sibling (the result of their father's affair) discovered in season 4 turned out to be yet another sister.

Radio

• Our Miss Brooks: In "Babysitting for Three", Miss Brooks visits a teenage student to see why he has missed the last few days of school. It turns out he's been at home taking care of his three small brothers while their mother is in the hospital and their traveling-salesman father is away. Miss Brooks agrees to look after the three younger siblings while the older boy catches a ride to see his mother. At episode's end, the boys' mother comes home with a brand-new baby brother. One family, five boys.

Religion

• In The Bible, Abraham and his descendants have mostly sons and few daughters for the first five generations. Out of Jacob's (his grandson) 70+ children and grandchildren, only a single daughter (Dinah) and a single granddaughter (Serah) are named in The Book of Genesis.

Video Games

• In Darkstalkers, Felicia comes from a One-Gender Race of Cat Folk. These catwomen mate with males of other races to reproduce, with the offspring always being another catgirl.
• In the Dragon Age series, Andraste only gave birth to two daughters during her lifetime, while her sons were actually her stepsons through her husband's concubine, and one of her daughters herself only had girls. The Chantry believes Andraste's lineage has only produced girls since then, but this may just be propaganda to justify keeping the Orlesian Chantry led by women and automatically disqualify any man who claims descent from her from claiming a leadership role. Notably, any actual proof of who her descendants are was lost due to a combination of Tevinter society being patriarchal and patrilineal (which is why their Divine is a man), records being lost during the second Blight, Andraste being so enraged that one of her daughters married a Tevinter magister that she destroyed the records herself, and her daughter, Vivial, destroying many more records for reasons known only to her.
• The Legend of Zelda: As introduced in Ocarina of Time, children of the Gerudo tribe are almost invariably female. A single male Gerudo is born every hundred years and becomes their king. The games' customary Big Bad, the Sorcerous Overlord Ganondorf, was one such male child.
• Pokémon: Certain Pokemon, like Combee, have the most skewed sex ratios, of 1/8, so that their eggs hatch with this kind of gender distribution. Combee are majority male. For Combee, this guarantees Vespiquen rarity, as they only evolve from female Combee.
• X: The reptilian Teladi discovered, after being separated from their homeworld due to the Portal Network shifting, that they can alternately reproduce by parthenogenesis: their eggs will always develop as female if unfertilized. This resulted in them effectively becoming a One-Gender Race even after they rediscovered their home planet and incorporated it into their corporatocracy.
• Yes, Your Grace: Eryk has three daughters, and it's revealed at some point in the game that it may or may not be because he was cursed to never have a heir while living in a setting in which Heir Club for Men is in place. During the game, Eryk can have a fourth child and choose to accomplish a magical ritual to make it a boy. If the ritual is skipped or has complications that require its reversal to save the mother's life, it will be a girl, which only reinforces the possibility that the curse is real.

Web Animation

• RWBY: The Arc family consists of the two parents and seven daughters, with the only son being Jaune Arc, who goes on to be leader of Team JNPR.

Webcomics

• In Blindsprings, prior to the Revolution, the Llyn royal family of Aberwelle had only produced daughters, and none of them had any luck producing the next generation, either dying or being infertile. Royal Inbreeding was the likely cause for some of these issues, as most Orphic families were somewhat inbred to try and preserve their magic.
• In Dan and Mab's Furry Adventures, the Nact'larn clan of Cubi has as their clan quirk that they only produce daughters.
• The webcomic version of Diary of a Wimpy Kid has the Matthews family, who would later become the Hills family in the books. They have a mother, a father, and five daughters— Lori (the inspiration for Heather), Piper (the inspiration for Holly), Jennifer, and two unnamed daughters. Greg's dad Frank teases Mr. Matthews that if he had a hundred more kids, they'd all be girls, and Greg (who has crushes on Piper and Lori) says that if Mr. Matthews did have a hundred more daughters, the world would be a more attractive place.
• In Girl Genius the Heterodyne family is known for only producing sons with two known exceptions: Euphrosynia, The Lost Lenore of Andronicus Valois the Storm King, and Agatha, the protagonist of the comic. In Agatha's case it's strongly implied that she was engineered somehow to be a host body for her mother Lucrezia. (There's also a scattering of female-looking names in the crypt, but it's possible they're only Heterodynes by marriage. Even if they're not, it still seems as if the Heterodynes are predominantly male.)
• Implied in the case of Antimony's family in Gunnerkrigg Court. Being descendants of fire elementals, the life force is passed from mother to daughter until the mother dies and as far as we know only female children are born.
• Kill Six Billion Demons: The Immortal Ruler Solomon David has fathered twenty-five generations of sons to serve as his councilors. The imbalance isn't addressed or explained, but his story arc which shows that he was once a normal man whose wife and daughters were killed by a lesser demiurge does make clear that he blinds himself to his own biases and the flaws in his "Law of Kings".
• In Muted the Severin family of witches only seems to produce sets of twin girls.
• Parodied in an NSFW strip from Oglaf. The barbarian Kronar declares that his bloodline has been "free from woman's taint" for generations, meaning the men reproduce and give birth all on their own. When a daughter is born Kronar orders the "bow of shame" put on her head as she's thrown into a pit of wolves, but after she kills the wolves Kronar accepts her as his "son."

Western Animation

• The Disney short Casey Bats Again has a baseball player wanting to have a son, but all of them turn out to be daughters. But seeing they have inherited his passion for baseball, he sets up a team for them.
• Kaeloo: Stumpy's family has eight children and all of them except for Stumpy are girls.
• In The Loud House, the titular family is well known for their children consisting almost entirely of daughters, with one exception: the show's protagonist, Lincoln.
• The Scotsman in Samurai Jack during the 50-year Time Skip in Season 5 has made enough children to form a small army out of them, and he doesn't have a single son out of them all.
• Star vs. the Forces of Evil: Star's friend Ponyhead has twelve sisters; some side content explains that unlike the Butterfly family, the Ponyhead family is a patriarchy and the reason they have so many daughters is because the king was trying for a son.

Real Life

• For reasons still not clearly understood, while theoretically every baby has a roughly 50/50 chance of being born male or female (ignoring rare intersex births), some families due to genetics and other unknown factors produce multiple offspring of a single gender. One couple produced fourteen sons in a row before finally having a daughter and another has fourteen daughters but no sons.
• The Martin family of Lisieux. Parents Zelie and Louis were the parents of nine children. The two boys both died as infants, and the five who lived to grow up were all female.
• Nine-Banded Armadillos nearly always have litters of four identical pups, either all male or all female, making them a naturally occurring example of this trope. This is because the armadillo zygote divides in four soon after it's formed, producing identical quadruplets.
• Malcolm X and his wife Betty had six girls, two of whom were twins that she was pregnant with when he was assassinated.

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