Second Law of Gender Bending

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

"Any character, after being gender bent, will come to enjoy their new gender more than their old gender."

A fictional character that gets his or her gender bent often becomes gradually accustomed to life as a new man or woman. Eventually they likely will experience an epiphany: that they are better off in their new gender than they ever were in their old one. This is the Second Law of Gender Bending, where a gender bent person would, if offered a chance to revert to their former gender, turn it down because they have come to enjoy the benefits of the change.

The epiphany typically takes one of two forms:

  • A reluctant admission, either because they've changed too much to return to the way things were or are loath to admit the enjoyment they get from their new lifestyle.
  • A jovial acceptance, where they quickly discover how much fun life is after the gender flip, and they never want to go back.

A specific variation of I Choose to Stay which often results from The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body. May involve Becoming the Mask or Going Native depending upon surrounding circumstances. Can result in Beneath the Mask when the character reveals a hidden, more feminine side of his/her personality. Contrast You Can't Go Home Again for characters who don't have any choice in the matter. See the First Law of Gender Bending and the Third Law of Gender Bending, which frequently (but not always) overlap with this trope.

Often used as an Ending Trope since invoking the second law typically resolves the gender-bent character's Fish Out of Water status, though it may not eliminate all Different for Girls moments.

The one Gender Bender plot that usually averts this law is when it occurs due to a Freaky Friday Flip.

See also It's the Journey That Counts.

Examples of Second Law of Gender Bending include:

Anime and Manga

  • Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl Hazumu never expresses any desire to return to her former gender. Of course, the aliens announced from the get-go that she couldn't become a boy again even if she wanted to, but you'd think she'd have missed something about life as a boy, even if it was only the ability to write her name in the snow. However, since the gender change allows her to get together with the girl(s) of her dreams and his/her parents seem to prefer it she really doesn't have all that much to complain about. (It doesn't hurt that pre-change Hazumu was more girly than every other girl in the series and may even have been transgender without realizing it.)
  • Averted in Ranma ½: Ranma never, ever, ever stops looking for a cure for his curse (except for one filler episode after he hits his head) though he does stop complaining about it. That said, Ranma starts to bring his macho approach to acting girly and cute. As seen in his competition with Tsubasa, Ranma's competitive streak is so hardwired that he even refuses to lose in a contest of femininity.
    • This doesn't stop him from exploiting the advantages of his female form for one minute, however.
  • Happens at the end of Cheeky Angel when Megumi finally realizes/admits that she'd been a girl all along: lacking the power to grant her wish to become male the trickster spirit had given her a purely mental Gender Bender instead. Since the delusion had helped her foster the tough, fair, forthright, and assertive (i.e., stereotypically "male") aspects of her personality Megumi considers her wish granted nonetheless.
  • The other transgender Megumi in The Day of Revolution goes the "reluctant admission" route when she's menaced by a boy and realizes that she finally knows how it truly feels to be a girl. Fortunately her new-found sense of femininity also empowers her to free herself with the ultimate female defence against male attackers: a Groin Attack so severe it practically paralyzes him.
  • Subverted in Sekirei. Homura deals with being a girl, but she doesn't like it and is obviously still uncomfortable with her growing attraction to her Designated Love Interest.
  • In One Piece Ivankov can use his Devil Fruit powers to change a person's gender; usually, the recipient wants him to do it, but he has done it to enemies, and reactions are mixed. One would-be assassin who barged into his club was subjected to it, and was clearly humiliated and mortified. On the other hand, when he did it to a male guard at Impel Down, the guard actually liked the change, and was willing to help him and Luffy. Ivankov himself has claimed that his powers "awaken" a person's "true self", and that he cannot change a person unless that person wants to be changed, even if it's only a subconscious desire.

Comic Books

  • Inverted twice over in an Excalibur story where the heroes are subjected to a Freaky Friday Flip with their enemies the Crazy Gang. Not only was Meggan not very happy with the Knave's male body, the Knave was really unhappy with hers too. Although given what he said, it may have had more to do with him not being able to control Meggan's shapeshifting ability than the gender issue

Fan Works

  • Becomes a plot point in Fool's Consequences, a Harry Potter/Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossover fic by "EllandrahSylver". The speed with which Calypso (formerly Draco) Malfoy adapts to and starts enjoying being female is noted on (and worried about) by several characters -- and leads to discoveries and developments that transform the story by the end of its existing material.
  • The Buffy the Vampire Slayer pseudo-crossover fic Xendra comes at this trope from several angles:
    • Andrew/Andrea, is very much a case, reinforced by Andrew's apparent Transgender status before That Halloween.
    • Xander/Xendra initially worries about it constantly, but eventually comes to a kind of equilibrium state where he's equally comfortable as either. Of course, Willow (and later Faith, too) being intensely into both of his forms helps a lot.
    • Wesley/Linda is an odd case. Wesley does not come to particularly prefer his female form, but because it makes it possible to be with the woman he loves, he chooses to become "Linda" permanently.

Film

  • Played with in Switch as when in heaven the protagonist can't decide whether to be a male or female angel.
  • Played with in Some Like It Hot. At first, Gerald doesn't like being Daphne. Dresses are too drafty, he can't hit on women, etc. Eventually, though, he enjoys being female immensely, to the point where the Ho Yay with Osgood is so great that Joe makes him say "I'm a boy," over and over. But hey -- Nobody's perfect.

Literature

  • The protagonist of David Thomas's novel Girl is a macho, laddish twenty something bloke who is mistaken for another patient while in hospital and mistakenly given gender reassignment surgery. Though initially horrified, when the news that reversing the procedure is unviable is broken to him he ends up deciding to commit fully to his new identity, and after comestic surgery, hormone replacement and therapy adapts to the life as an attractive, well-adjusted young woman. When towards the end of the book he/she is asked whether he was angry at the doctor responsible (she is suing the hospital) the protagonist admits that, given the chance, she would not want to give up her new life and female identity.
  • So typical of most of Jack Chalker's Gender Bender works (given his tendency to subordinate Different for Girls to The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body) that only the exceptions are notable, like Joe de Oro from the River of Dancing Gods series, who never accepts being changed from a barbarian hero into a tree nymph.
    • An interesting variation occurs in Jack Chalker's Well World series: All new arrivals on the titular Well World are transformed into one of the native species (and frequently Gender Bent as well.) This is usually followed by a Sense Freak and/or Showing Off the New Body when they wake up in their new forms and eventually leads to an epiphany that they now regard their new body as their natural form.
    • Played straight in Chalker's The Identity Matrix: The protagonist embraces becoming a woman partially because it gets her the attention she's always craved and partially because the Government Conspiracy knowingly played upon that desire when they messed with her head.
    • Subverted in Chalker's The Four Lords of the Diamond series. In each of the books, the main character has his brain pattern imprinted on four prisoners, each being sent to a different planet in the Warden Diamond Penal Colony. One of the bodies is that of a female. Fortunately for the protagonist, he is going to a planet that has the strange property of switching the minds of two people when they sleep with each other (in the literal sense). He jumps at the first opportunity to get himself back into a male body, and never looks back.
  • As one might suspect from the title, the entire plot of Justin Lieber's Beyond Rejection revolves around getting an involuntary Gender Bender to this point.
  • Variation 2 shows up in Sean McMullan's Eyes of the Calculor: John Glasken's distress at being reincarnated in the beautiful body of young Valesti Disore initially manifests in a lot of psychopathic behavior (such as amputating the hand of a man who dared to pinch her butt) but in the end she claims she finds being a woman (albeit one with a "baleful and malevolent" reputation) "rather liberating."
  • In Lois McMaster Bujold's A Civil Campaign, Lady Donna Vorutyer goes offworld for gender reassignment surgery so she can contest her vile cousin's ascension to her late brother's Countship. Lord Dono soon admits that while she primarily did it out of a sense of duty, he'd discovered there were some advantages to being a man (especially in Barrayar's highly sexist society) so even if he lost he would remain a man in order to explore them.
  • In Orlando: a Biography, the title character sums it up: "Praise God, I'm a woman!"
  • Slightly subverted in The Warlock Of Strathearn. The main character turns himself into a woman because he falls in love with a lesbian. This works out very well for awhile, and he enjoys many aspects of being a woman. Eventually, though, after his lover dies, he begins to experience the not-so-good parts of being a woman, and begins to want to be a man again. However, his powers aren't working anymore, and he has to make a deal with someone to change him back into a man. He turns out to like different qualities of being either gender.
  • In The Wheel of Time after Balthamel is resurrected in the body of a Borderland woman he comes to accept his new life as a woman. His/her appetite for sex and women is not lessened in the slightest, the gender change does however broaden his interests and provide him a wealth of new assets.
  • From Discworld: Although he's only crossdressing, not actually a woman, Corporal Nobbs is reluctant to get back into his male uniform/role after he's spent half of Jingo wandering around Klatch as Beti.
  • Andrew Jackson Libby, a character from several of Robert A. Heinlein's works, had his gender changed to female when he was resurrected, when it's discovered that he had both male and female sex chromosomes. He changes his name to Elizabeth Andrew Jackson Libby Long, and tells anyone and everyone that he's much happier as a woman.

Mythology

  • Possibly Tiresias from Greek Mythology, who spent seven years as a woman (and bore children) after killing a mating female snake, then transformed back into a man after killing a male; at very least, one can assume he enjoyed sex better as a woman. Zeus and Hera called upon him to settle an argument over which gender enjoyed it more (as he alone had experienced it from both perspectives), and Tiresias claimed, "Of ten parts a man enjoys one only." In other words, he was saying a woman enjoys it ten times as much. By the by, that crack was what got him turned into a Blind Seer, as Hera did not take the answer well and Zeus tried to make up for his wife's behavior by giving Tiresias powers of prophecy.

Music

  • The Who song "I'm a Boy" subverts this trope; the narrator can't wait to resume his normal sex role.

Tabletop Games

  • Stories in Dungeons & Dragons regarding the dreaded Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity (a cursed magic iten that gender bends the user, with the First Law in full effect) tend to subvert this Trope:
    • In Baldur's Gate, a jester gives one as a “gift” to Duke Lobelahn's lover; neither the Duke nor his lover found the joke very funny, the jester was executed.
    • The sourcebook The Shining South (of the Forgotten Realms setting) relates that the halfling fighter/wizard Brac Bristletoes had his girdle of storm giant strength stolen. He eventually recovered what he thought was his belt, but unfortunately, it was a girdle of masculinity/femininity. Brac spent several years with the woman's body until he earned enough to pay an archmage who could reverse the effect, clearly not liking the change at all.

Video Games

  • Xion from Kingdom Hearts is an iffy example. She is physically male or genderless but was treated as female throughout the game. Regardless, she considers herself female even after the reveal.

Xion: Now its time for the puppet to play her part.

  • Her anatomy is clearly female at the start of the game and clearly male when she fights Roxas.
  • Disturbingly subverted in the Eroge X-Change. Takuya's life is almost unarguably worse as a girl (he goes from ignored milquetoast to potential sex toy for almost anyone in the school), but in the bad endings, she's too far gone or traumatized to care.
    • Played straight in many instances with X-Change Alternative in which Kaoru does indeed come to be more comfortable as a girl in a few endings. However these endings fluctuate between good and outright bad. Miu, Renji, and Touya's routes has this play out in a fashion that just about fills most good ending criteria, Saya's is fairly neutral, and Mizuki just doesn't have a female ending. Kyoka's female ending on the other hand plays out with X-Change's old "too far gone" approach with them nothing more than sex toys for Yui and her brother.
  • In World of Warcraft, Chromie is a male dragon who almost always appears to humans as a female gnome. Why? As she herself explained in the Visage Day comic book adaptation, she tried many male visage forms, but never felt comfortable with them, and that the female gnome simply "suits" her more. Not many mortals press the subject, for while she is usually benign, she is a dragon.

Webcomics

  • Subverted in Misfile. Despite her life being much improved in several aspects, Ash is still vehemently trying to go back to being a boy, even if it means that all the good things she achieved in the meantime disappear. Keeping a firm grasp of "his" male identity remains top priority over all else.
    • Double subverted, Ash realizes that things would kind of change for the worse if (s)he becomes a boy again. (S)He has then doubts about turning back into a boy.
  • Averted in The Order of the Stick. Roy doesn't seem to terribly mind being female (it helps him get perspective on the kind of person Miko Miyazaki is), but he'd much rather have his "Trouser Titan".
  • The Wotch positively loves this trope, with four jocks-turned-cheerleaders (who later got a spinoff comic), a male teacher turned Asian girl student and an Innocent Bystander-turned-Perky Female Minion, amongst others. There's even a variation where a woman turned centaur decides she prefers that form as well.
    • Special mention goes to a couple who keeps swapping bodies and gender as a Running Gag. The one person who has expressed an interest in trying the other gender again recreationally is the girl, not the guy.
  • Played straight in Cheer (the aforementioned spinoff comic of The Wotch) when Jo, the only one of the the transformed cheerleaders who knows she used to be a boy, freely admits that she and her friends were all troubled as boys and are all much happier as girls, though she still cries when she discovers that no one remembers her former male self's Crowning Moment of Awesome. The other three jocks-turned-cheerleaders have so far averted this trope, since they don't appear to remember the past.
  • Largely averted in El Goonish Shive despite all of the constant Gender Bending: Elliot has no interest in remaining female for long and considers his gender-bending Power Incontinence distasteful, Justin specifically rejects the idea even though it would make him sexually compatible with the object of his unrequited affection, Ellen accepts it without expressing any preference (though there are hints that the Loss of Identity associated with Opposite Sex Cloning Blues was a sore point until she got a new set of memories).
    • It's touching in Vlad/Vladia's case. There's nothing kinky about her accepting the change—for the first time in her whole life normal people aren't terrified by the sight of her, so she's willing to accept any form provided it's human, which her old, male form decidedly was not. And given that her one attempt to use her supposed shapeshifting powers was a painful, near-death experience she's not about to experiment even given the chance.
    • The curent theory is that Elliot will acquire new female forms again and again until he really likes one of them—then again, it was Tedd's idea. Between flying around as a superheroine and ogling Perky Goth form in a mirror, he may have found this already.
    • Tedd is the only straight example. He likes this form of shapeshifting because his androgynous face becomes an advantage while close enough to Tedd's own form and he likes to feel attractive. Once this problem became moot it was revealed that Body Swap is #37 on his fetish list.
  • Variation 1 shows up in Sailor Sun, though it seems less like grudging acceptance than flat-out surrender to hear Bay describe it. (Naturally, it's immediately followed by a Snap Back due to amnesia, proving the first law takes precedence.)
  • Mocked in one strip of Murry Purry Fresh and Furry; the parody TF comic boils down to "Boys are hideous and live bleak, miserable lives; girls (and boys turned girls) are pretty and have perfect lives with no problems".
  • The older T-Girls of Jet Dream all come to the first form of acceptance at varying rates. However, teen T-Girl Cookie Jarr was an awkward young lad transformed into a knockout of a girl. She is quickly excited by the possibilities of being an extremely attractive and enthusiastically bisexual girl, even voicing a desire to remain female instead of taking a hypothetical antidote to Virus-X. ("It's the Love-In Generation, Harmony! And I was being Left-Out! But a chick can play with Jacks AND Jills! Double the Hills, Dig!")
  • Played with in The Good Witch: Angel is fond of using magic spells to force these sorts of second law declarations out of her brother as a form of torment. Played straight with Angel herself, though.
  • Played with a great deal in The Dragon Doctors, since there are a great deal of gender benders in it. It's all over the map, ranging from genuine gender dysphoria to total acceptance and everything in between.
  • Probably played straight with Julius of The Key to Her Heart, mainly because being female allows him to have a relationship with the girl he loves, who is a lesbian. also played straight with his mom (who took to her mode-locking to female with gusto) but subverted with his dad, who is very much a manly badass-type who does not take well to his gender-changing.
  • The emperor from Beyond The Veil embraces this trope mere minutes after changing genders. It's implied issues with a new body were never a big concern and she takes her second-in-command as her new lover (having never found a worthy one as a man) before going back to trying to conquer the universe.
  • Very, very averted with the main character of Exiern, and played emphatically straight with one of the priests. The latter example started as a Crowning Moment of Funny before becoming a solid counterpoint to the main character's plight.
  • In Eerie Cuties, this is Zigzagged for Ace. In one story in chapter 0, he is Gender Bent along with most of the school, and he is upset about it at first, but quickly sees a benefit, as he can sneak away and make out with Kade (who is such an attractive Bishonen that Even the Guys Want Him) without it seeming awkward. Unfortunately, by doing this, she does not get the cure that the rest of the school does, and starts to regret it - but then she sees more benefits. Her parents are very understanding (it seems his father would have preferred a daughter, and can now admit it to him) and because female werewolves go through puberty faster, he no longer has the problem where she couldn’t revert his paws to hands. Plus Layla decides not to kill her for trying to steal Kade (as she finds it so hilarious) and he is invited to her slumber party, without being the Designated Victim of the "makeover". Ace spends four entire chapters as a girl, until the curse is finally undone at the end of the fourth.

Web Original

  • The main characters in Whateley Academy, almost as a rule. It doesn't hurt that being turned female was a side effect to gaining the superpowers which make them some of the most attractive and powerful people on the planet. (It's also completely and utterly impossible for them to change back, period.) A common critique of the series is the following of this trope to the absolute letter.
    • It bears mentioning that the Exemplar power-set (Most Common Superpower as an actual power), the most common way it happens in the series, also contains a psychological aspect to it—the power eventually forces the person to accept their changes. There's also a theory that Exemplars only transform into what they truly want to look like deep inside—about half of the exemplared main characters realized they were (psychologically) transgender slightly before or right after the changes started.
    • It's also relevant to point out that two of the main characters (Phase and Bladedancer) don't want to be girls, and Phase is still trying his hardest to get changed back, including trying some risky things, so that's an aversion of the trope. The trope doesn't apply to Chaka (who had been Transgender before her change) and Generator (whose manifestation caused her to realize she'd been transgender all along, but didn't actually change her physically, making her desperate to convert all the way to a real girl). Nor does it apply to Heroic Sociopath Jobe, who is working hard to undo his accident. The trope does apply to Fey, Tennyo, and Lancer - but Lancer is now a guy.
      • Phase is an unusual case: for one thing, he hasn't turned completely into a girl, and doesn't seem to be doing so; his body is entirely female except for his genitalia, which are entirely male. Not to mention that there have been hints that he's now actually more well-endowed. He thought at first this was a weird case of GSD, but it was eventually revealed that it seemed to be entirely the fault of his BIT. It's recently been revealed that his BIT looks like it's been "hacked together from a dozen other people, who aren't (sic) inter-relating well." And that's not even mentioning the big thing: Phase didn't have the meta-gene complex as recently as two years ago, and now somehow does, suggesting that one or more extremely powerful beings are intentionally screwing up his life.
      • Reach, meanwhile, plays it completely straight. Due to psychological issues, when he's in male form, he tends to base himself off the person his abusive father wanted him to be, namely a failure. In her female form, she has Exemplar strength. Plus, she gets along well with her girlfriend in both forms. She averts the first law, however, able to change back. In theory.
  • Pretty much the second staple of amateur Gender Bender fiction after Different for Girls.
  • There is a video Geraldine where a young man is turned into a woman against his will in some unexplained way. After a decade of assimilating to the point of dating, becoming a famous model, and becoming the leader of France, the man turns back on his wedding day. He then ends up with his best (girl) friend instead.
  • Artist Ian Samson does a lot of gender-bending work, much of which plays with this trope. Link of The Legend of Zelda succumbs to the Second Law a few times in his work, whether becoming a fairy or forced to stay in the form of a Gerudo.
  • In the Paradise setting, humans are randomly, permanently changed into Funny Animals (with some experiencing a gender-change at the same time). A number of stories follow the journey of gender-changed characters as they come to accept and then enjoy their new (usually female) gender. Some stories take this a notch further into Third Law of Gender Bending territory.
  • This, but for species rather than gender, is essentially the 54th law of 'Morphic Transformation. (Yeah, there are a lot of them.
  • In the SCP Foundation, Agent Diogenes has had his/her gender changed so many times by magical artifacts that, in addition to a now very androgynous appearance, said Agent also is comfortable with the new gender identity they took, that identity being none. Diogenes refuses to pick either, state what the biological sex even is at this point and also refuses to alter things like hair or uniform to make a more masculine or feminine impression.

Western Animation

  • In the Futurama episode "Neutopia", a sexless alien first takes away everyone's gender, then when asked to restore them gets everyone backwards. The now-male Leela, Amy, and LaBarbara struggle to save the sinking Planet Express while the feminized men have fun being girls and goofing off. When the "guys" force the "girls" to make a swimsuit calendar, they go along with it a lot more happily than the real women did earlier. Despite all this, the men go back to their original sex with zero protests when the opportunity came up (except for Scruffy, who came in late).
  • In the Harley Quinn episode "Riddle U", shapeshifting villain Clayface assumes a female identity - "Stephanie" - in order to help Harley and Ivy infiltrate Gotham University, and starts to have way too much fun being "in character". Harley actually has to remind him (more than once!) that he's a giant clay-monster in disguise.

Real Life

  • This is definitely not Truth in Television. Messing with a person's gender identity in Real Life usually results in dysphoria instead of acceptance. However, since it's still not possible to literally change a person's physical sex (a so-called "sex change" is essentially cosmetic), there are no true Real Life examples to draw from.
  • Every once in a while, a mutation crops up that causes chromosomal males to . . . develop around puberty rather than before birth. People with the mutation usually identify as male, and in one study, 17 out of 18 wound up Happily Married to women. (To a certain extent, this depends on culture—in a study of an incredibly patriarchal New Guinea society, children born with the mutation had difficulties being accepted into either gender.)
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