Animal Gender Bender/Playing With

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Basic Trope: An animal characters has physical traits that should only apply to whichever gender the character is not.

  • Straight: Joey, the male kangaroo, has a pouch.
  • Exaggerated:
    • His best friends comprise a bull with an udder, a doe with antlers, a peahen with colorful feathers, a lioness with a mane, etc.
    • Alternatively, it has a joey in it.
  • Justified:
    • Joey is a Hermaphrodite.
    • Alternatively, he's actually part of a kangaroo-like alien race whose males have pouches.
  • Inverted: Both male and female are pouchless.
  • Subverted: Joey is actually a female who just acts masculine; everyone presumes her to be a male.
  • Double subverted: Joey actually is a pouched male; not wanting to be made fun of because of it, he convinces everyone that he's actually a manly female.
  • Parodied:
  • Deconstructed: Joey is a male kangaroo with a pouch. Biologists notice this and capture him for and force him into an exhausting scientific study.
  • Reconstructed: One of the scientists is Jane Goodall, who, despite being an expert on chimpanzees and having not a lot do do with kangaroos, takes an interest in Joey and treats him nicely and eventually sets him free.
  • Zig Zagged: Joey was born female but had a sex-change operation, and never had the pouch removed. However, his brother was born male and has a pouch. And their other brother doesn't.
  • Averted: Only the female kangaroos have pouches.
  • Enforced: "Pouches are cool."
  • Lampshaded: "Why do I have a pouch, anyway? I'm pretty sure I'm a male!"
  • Invoked: Joey's pouch was surgically implanted, or resulted from him taking female hormones.
  • Defied: A mad scientist makes a race of kangaroos, but explicitly makes sure that the males don't have pouches.
  • Discussed: "I thought that kangaroo was the little joey's mom, but it turns out it's his dad."
  • Conversed: "Isn't it weird when books have male kangaroos with pouches? What's the deal with that?"
  • Played for Laughs:
    • Joey "cross-dresses" by putting on a fake pouch.
    • Alternatively, he uses his pouch as a pocket.
  • Played for Drama: Joey undergoes a female-to-male sex-change operation, but something goes wrong during the surgery, so that the pouch can't be removed without serious negative effects.

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