Real Life Animal Gender Benders
Sometimes, this trope occurs in real life.
Examples:
- Does can grow antlers, though it is rare, and the results tend to be noticeably different from male antlers. For example, they aren't shed at the usual time. This may vary by species.
- Caribou/reindeer are the only species of deer where both males and females have antlers, though fiction always depicts female reindeer without antlers.
- Female lions DO get manes—if they are very, very old. It's a hormone thing just like old ladies getting beards. It sometimes also occurs in prides that have few or no males, with the maned females taking on a more masculine role in order to make it seem as if the pride has more males than it actually does. In a similar way, there are also male lions that never get a mane. In fact, there is an entire race of maneless lions. Also, male lions are maneless if they are neutered.
- Peahens with peacock colors have occasionally been reported. It's also possible for an elderly peahen who has stopped laying eggs to grow a train like the male's.
- There are male tortoiseshell/calico cats, but they either have an extra X chromosome (XXY or Klinefelter's Syndrome), a somatic mutation on the orange gene causing a mosaic, XX/XY chimerism, XY/XXY chimerism, or XY/XY chimerism. In the former case, the cat will nearly always be sterile, but in the latter four cases, the cat can be fertile.
- The tortoiseshell male being a gender bender applies only to cats and hamsters, as cats and hamsters carry the orange gene (called red gene for cats, called yellow gene for hamsters) and tortoiseshell pattern in a sex-linked way. The other two animals that can be tortoiseshell, guinea pigs and rabbits, have the tortoiseshell pattern be carried on an autosome instead. The rabbit's tortoiseshell pattern is represented by the Japanese Brindle (ej) gene on the Extension locus. That means that there are as many male tortie guinea pigs and male tort rabbits as female tortie guinea pigs and rabbits respectively.
- There are rare occasions where female narwhals do indeed have tusks.
- Some female Asian elephants have very small tusks (called "tushes") which can only be seen when the mouth is open.
- On some occasions, male elephants can lack tusks even if they are African elephants (which have tusks in both genders). It's been theorized this an evolutionary response to deal with poachers who hunt elephants for ivory.
- Freemartins
are female mammals, especially cattle and some other large livestock species, that are infertile and display masculinized behavior. This is the expected outcome in 90% of cases where a cow has opposite-sex twins—during gestation, the twins' blood supplies in their placentas become conjoined, which results in the female twin receiving cellular material from her brother and in theory producing the popular fictional depiction of male-presenting cattle with udders. The term shows up occasionally in older speculative fiction to refer to infertile women, or women who behave in a masculine manner. - Sometimes if a flock of chickens has no roosters, one of the hens will stop laying eggs and start crowing. Much like the lionesses and peahens mentioned above, this can also happen as a result of old age.
Genderbent Animals Analysis by Species
- Cattle/Aurochs: Their vulnerability to this trope seems to stem from the fact that cows and bulls are typically portrayed in entirely separate roles. Cows are typically thought of as being docile farm animals, while bulls are more commonly thought of as aggressors that would be trying to run down a matador. Adding to this association is that they tend to be given different fur patterns in fiction — fictional cows are usually spotted, and fictional bulls are usually solid-color. Add this to very young audiences often not yet knowing that milk doesn't just come from cows, and you get an erroneous perception of their being entirely separate species. In other words, it's mainly a matter of association.
- Ducks and other birds: When it comes to coloration, more brightly colored feathers are given to bird characters regardless of sex for the same reason that male birds have the brighter colors in the first place — they're just more visually interesting than their relatively dull-coated female counterparts. There's also gender associations being different for humans than for birds, in that women are typically expected to have more striking appearances than men.
- Lions: are usually safe from this trope as very few viewers are ignorant to the well-known fact that lions, with their usually maned males and their maneless females, are practically inversions of Furry Female Mane the species.
