Basic Trope: You can only use a particular skill if you are a particular gender.
- Straight:
- Women have the power to emit light from their hands. Men cannot.
- Men have the power to play with fire. Women can't.
- In the same world, only women can cast light by themselves, while only men can play with fire.
- Exaggerated: One gender can cast ALL forms of magic, while the other can't even comprehend how it works.
- Downplayed: One gender is naturally attuned to magic, while the other has to study it before being able to use it.
- Justified:
- The being who grants the power is a sexist rat.
- The power is carried by the X and/or Y chromosomes.
- The skill requires a body part only one gender has.note
- Inverted:
- In a World… with severe gender divide, manipulating electricity is is one of the few things men and women have in common.
- A woman and a man must learn the same ability together for either of them to use it.
- A society of spirits defines gender soley based upon magical abilities.
- Subverted:
- Bob starts learning how to emit light from his hands, just like women.
- Alice starts learning how to play with fire, just like men.
- Double Subverted: But after a series of failures, they both give up and return to their natural talents.
- Alice and Bob try to get other women and men respectively to cross learn and find they cannot. They are both revealed to be intersex by this.
- Parodied:
- The women hide away in midnight cult meetings to practice magic in secret, while as far as they know their husbands keep occupied by going off to their Brotherhood of Funny Hats. The men, meanwhile, spend their time at the Brotherhood practicing secret arcane rituals, while as far as they know their wives are off doing some kind of yoga thing.
- Gender is defined by over-the-top, old-fashioned standards. A woman who wants light powers must Stay in the Kitchen and conform to the Old-Timey Ankle Taboo, and a man who wants pyrokinesis must be a muscular Walking Shirtless Scene with an enormous mustache! You also have to be heterosexual, and are obliged to use every public toilet you see corresponding to the gender you were assigned at birth. (Every.)
- Someone insists to a transmasculine wizard that he can't actually use fire magic because he's not really male. He engulfs them in a giant fireball, and they remark that they suddenly feel a little hot, but it's probably just the sunlight.
- Zig-Zagged: Men have the power to play with fire. Women couldn't until recently, where girls start learning with varying success. Meanwhile, it's revealed that some men became pyrophobic due to their horrid accidents.
- Alice starts using fire magic and encourages other women to try it and they cannot do it. Her ability to use both is because she was born intersex.
- Averted: Only a group of people can control ice, but who can do that isn't determined by gender.
- Enforced: It's a book for girls in the 'boys are icky' stage of life, which wants to justify the Improbably Female Cast in its Extranormal Institute.
- Lampshaded: Alice taunts Bob for being able to make with his hands only inferior replicas of the things she can conjure up out of thin air. ("Because I'm a girl!")
- Invoked:
- A witch casts a spell that makes all the men of her society who haven't yet learned magic unable to do so.
- The difference is not in who is capable of learning the abilities, but in which gender is permitted to. No one will teach "male" magic to women, or vice versa.
- Exploited: Women use their special abilities to assert their dominance over men and later enact a male gendercide.
- Defied: A sympathetic witch fixes the magic system so that men can learn it as well.
- Discussed: "If only I could learn magic too, I'd show up that bitch."
- Conversed: "Seriously, why is magic so sexist?"
- Implied: In a world known for fire powers, only men hold tools to conjure it.
- Deconstructed:
- The gender exclusivity leaves the other as exclusively second-class citizens — they just can't compete with magic.
- Fire is seen as misogynistic because only men can use it; light is considered misandrist because only women can use it.
- Reconstructed:
- That gender became so reliant on magic, the other had to have them save them when an Apocalypse How event prohibited magic use. Thus the magic wielders have to eat humble pie.
- The society changes its tune when a few people realize that, if everybody adhered strictly to this sentiment, men would go blind and women would freeze, both of which are bad for all concerned.
- Played for Laughs: The effects of gendered magic are used for crude jokes. Wizards take great pride in the size of their staffs. Meanwhile, once a month, witches have their magic turn purely destructive.
Back to Gender-Restricted Ability, but only if you're male.
