Gender Swap: female to male

[Deepbluediver]

There are quite a few modern stories (webcomics, manga, etc) about how a guy magically/scientifically gets transformed into a girl (or woman), and there are also a fair number of stories (some classical, some modern) where a female dresses up and pretends to be a guy or takes on a usually-masculine role.
But there seem to be very few stories where a girl gets transformed into a male character, and doesn't want to be. The handful of examples I can think of are usually done in comedy series, and rarely last more than a single chapter/epsiode/comic. TV Tropes even calls this out on it's rules for gender-switching that when a guy get's turned into a girl the universe itself seems to contort itself into all kinds of screwy ways to keep him as such, but examples of the opposite are practically non-existent.

I'm usually not a fan of this kind of gender reversal, mostly, I think, because it's depicted as comedic when I see something like this as being a fairly serious challenge to an individual's personal identity. It's kind of like rapidly-forced transgenderism, and with a very small handful of possible exceptions, I don't think most works really explore that aspect of it at all.

What I'm really curious about though, is if anyone knows of ANY stories, in any media, that depict a female character being "stuck" as a guy. I think part of my distaste for this sort of thing is that it seems very one sided, so I'm hoping some one will be able to point me in the direction of some examples of the sort of thing that I haven't been able to find on my own. If there truly are NO examples out there, why might that be?

[Kato]

I think I recall some movie with some godawful comedian who was a robber who swapped bodies with a cheerleader or something... It was bad but it was what you were looking for, kind of. (Apparently it was Hot Chick)


As for actual "girl transforms into boy" stories... to tvtropes!
Vision of Escaflowne kind of treats it but it's far from centered on, it just... happens to a character.
CUTExGUY apparently focuses on it, but I'm not familiar with that work.
Then there is this.
Something Special seems to center on it, but again, never encountered it.
It's a Boy Girl Thing...
Cycler seems to be a novel kind of on topic...
Apparently El Goonish Shive handles a variety of gender swaps but I'm not following that either.
Webcomic Gender Swapped treats both kinds...

That's what I can gather from a skim of the gender swap page, anyway... and ten times... nah, twenty times at least the other way round.

[Serpentine]

The Australian movie Dating the Enemy has a feuding couple swap bodies with one another. It's a movie I like.


As for why there's lots male->female and hardly any female->males... Well, from a feminist perspective, for a great deal of human history it's been easier to be male than female in most ways - especially the ways that "matter". There's also the fact that - although it's changing - the masculine is the "default": "he" is gender neutral, as an example. The other examples escape me right now, although there's a bunch of them, but basically men are the foundation, "assumed unless stated otherwise".
Separately, but related, in the western world it tends to be more acceptable for a woman to act or strive to be like a man, but less acceptable for a man to act or strive to be like a woman. A woman in trousers is commonplace; a man in a skirt is comedy.
Combine the three, and you have this: a man turning into a woman has drama, excitement and comedic fuel. A man having to be a woman is a challenge. A man becoming a woman is going from the standard to the non-standard.
A woman turning into a man finds it easier. Wearing pants isn't anything new. It's going from the Other to the Assumed. They're "stepping up" in life. A woman acting like a man isn't anything new nowadays, and is even encouraged.

I'd like to point out that the above explanation isn't fair to men, either. There are plenty of ways that a woman would find being a man hard or frustrating, but Hollywood et al are notoriously slow at changing their stereotypes, so I wouldn't expect to find too many movies exploring that aspect. Dating the Enemy does a bit, but it's kinda hard to say seeing as neither of the main characters are really paragons of masculine and feminine stereotypes to start with (e.g. the woman is a slob, the man constantly preens over his appearance; he (as her) has to deal with periods and PMS, she (as him) has to deal with... bits getting out of control; there's a lot more to it than that, but you get the idea).

tl;dr: You see lots of male-to-female because that's dramatic and funny and going from boring to interesting. You won't see much female-to-male because that's unchallenging and easy and going from Other to Same. At least, that's my hypothesis. It'd be an interesting thing to study...

[PlusSixPelican]

MISFILE

How did no one mention Misfile. It handles this kind of thing rather seriously.

But they HAVE done it the other way. Shakespeare did it for crying out loud.

Granted, in Twelfth Knight, Viola doesn't become a man so much as disguise herself as one, but the point is, it's been explored in both directions.

[Serpentine]

Women disguising themselves as men is an old, old trope. But that's not what the OP's talking about: they're taking about a woman being turned into a man.

[Traab]

I dont have any examples, like you said, it seems really rare. But at least I HAVE read stories of male to female (permanent) where it isnt treated as a comedy. It was a naruto fanfic believe it or not. Naruto gets turned female and spends probably the first half of the story trying to avoid a full on mental breakdown over his/her loss of identity. Doesnt help that naruto gets sexually assaulted early on as well, though naruto ends up crushing the guys pelvis like he is a sentient jackhammer.

You know, that IS weird. I have seen several girl pretends to be a guy type movies and shows, but aside from that rob schnieder film hot chicks, none where the girl is actually turned into a guy.

[Kato]

I think one major point is... well, it's sexist but many writers are men and I'd guess being stuck in a woman's body means having stuff to... play around with. It's a pretty weird fetish but I guess it's prominent enough.
I can't make any judgement how many women fantasize about being a man for a day or so and having manly parts to play with... (I for my part obviously fail to see anything interesting about it) But either women just don't have that interest or they don't feel the need to turn it into stories too often...

Though I AM pretty sure if one was to browse e.g. fanfiction.net looking for it there would be a few examples of the trope...

It's just quite a different experience from disguising as a man since this is more about emancipation and giving women the chance to prove they are as good as men where gender swapping really either is comedy or traumatic if taken serious and if one was to apply it to a gender sensitive topic the best that could come out of it is "it doesn't matter whether you're a man or a woman"....

[KillianHawkeye]

I agree with Serpentine.

It's just a fact of our society that being a man is considered "easier" than being a woman. In order to achieve equality, the feminists are encouraged to be more like men. A statement such as "a woman can do anything a man can do" implies the fight is to disprove the stereotype that women aren't suited for doing a man's job.

Thus, in fiction, a man becoming a woman is a curse, but a woman becoming (or pretending to be) a man is something she chooses in order to better her own position or to achieve some goal that being a woman prevented her from achieving (Ex: the movie Mulan, where the title character pretended to be a man so she could join the army in ancient China).

I should point out that this "truth" of drama isn't just held up by male authors. Rumiko Takahashi, the creator of the martial-arts comedy manga Ranma 1/2, in which the character Ranma is cursed with the body of a woman whenever he is doused with cold water, is herself a woman.

[Saph]

As the OP points out, it's incredibly, incredibly rare.

Oddly enough, the only good treatment I've ever seen of it was nonfiction, not fiction. A New York journalist named Norah Vincent wrote a book called Self-Made Man where she spent a year passing as male. She had something pretty close to a breakdown at the end of it due to psychological stress (which might be one of the reasons this trope is rare) – in her case she found that being male wasn't "easy" at all.

[KillianHawkeye]

Oddly enough, the only good treatment I've ever seen of it was nonfiction, not fiction. A New York journalist named Norah Vincent wrote a book called Self-Made Man where she spent a year passing as male. She had something pretty close to a breakdown at the end of it due to psychological stress (which might be one of the reasons this trope is rare) – in her case she found that being male wasn't "easy" at all.

Well sure, in real life, men have to deal with a lot of expectation. There's a lot of pressure to perform. In a lot of ways, failure isn't an option for us. Or at least, we're taught that failing means letting down the ones who depend on us. Men are expected to be the providers and the leaders, to be exceptional rather than ordinary.

People like myself, with relatively little ambition, get stuck at the bottom with nothing but regrets.

[Saph]

Well sure, in real life, men have to deal with a lot of expectation. There's a lot of pressure to perform. In a lot of ways, failure isn't an option for us. Or at least, we're taught that failing means letting down the ones who depend on us. Men are expected to be the providers and the leaders, to be exceptional rather than ordinary.

Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with why genderbending stories are so one-way. Socially, there's a tendency for men to be defined by what they do, and women by who they are.

So a man -> woman change means that all of a sudden, the character's the focus of attention. Everyone's interested in how they look, how they dress, how they act, etc. They're getting a whole new kind of attention and perspective that they've never had before, which the story is going to deal with at length.

For a woman -> man change, though, it's the other way around. They're going to get less attention in and of themselves – the focus becomes what they can accomplish. For whatever reason, most writers aren't interested in that kind of story.

[Deepbluediver]

Thanks for all the replies, definitely some interesting things to think about. I had tried to avoid listing all the stuff I've seen or read, because as I said most if it I didn't like.

As for actual "girl transforms into boy" stories... to tvtropes!
Vision of Escaflowne kind of treats it but it's far from centered on, it just... happens to a character.

I've seen Escaflowne, and as I recall, this one really seemed to come out of nowhere in the second-to-last episode. It brought on one of those collective "WTF?!?" moments in our group. Still, it qualifies, I guess.

EGS is one of those comics I can never seem to get through the archives for before I get distracted and wander off. Guess I'm gonna have to just buckle down and make a more concerted effort. The rest I will also check out as soon as I have some time, maybe this weekend

I do read MISFILE, and I like it, precisely because it does things differently and favors the dramatic aspect and the author doesn't need to cram in a "joke" every three pages that basically says "remember how X used to be male isn't that funny you should laugh now".
I'm looking at you, Ranma.

Oddly enough, the only good treatment I've ever seen of it was nonfiction, not fiction. A New York journalist named Norah Vincent wrote a book called Self-Made Man where she spent a year passing as male.

Oh that I am definitely going to have to read.
Edit: quote fixed


As a reply to several comments, gender swapping isn't a new thing in fiction (or even real life, as both Cracked and TVTropes point out), but it seems to fall into one of three categories (in general order of rarity)

1) Women dress up as men to get something they couldn't otherwise. (fairly common in both classic and modern works, and in real life)
2) Men are forced to become women and don't want to be. (mostly more recent in fiction, historical examples are...probably more squicky than I want to get into)
3) Men wanting to dress up as a women to avoid doing something manly or to get access to somewhere men aren't normally allowed (this last one goes all the way back to greek literature, with Achilles and Odysseus, though most recent works play it for comedy)

My original post was focused on the apparent gap that seems to exist where there isn't really very much about women who are forced to pretend they are men (or get transmogrified into a male).
With the explosion of modern stories involving strong female leads, tomboy-type girls, sensitive and caring men, the occasional cross-dresser, and (when you get into the limitless ocean that is fanfiction) every possible romantic pairing, sane or otherwise, the aforementioned combination of factors seems like it's the only thing actually being AVOIDED by most writers.

I would think that it's at the very least a curisousity, and possibly some sort of insight into our cultural relationship with gender identity. (what that insight could be I have no idea)

[Tvtyrant]

Women disguising themselves as men is an old, old trope. But that's not what the OP's talking about: they're taking about a woman being turned into a man.

But under the old single sex model, the two are largely the same. There are many parables of women acting like men and spontaneously changing.

Making Sex strikes again!

[Mx.Silver]

There is the matter that most writers tend to be male, and as such may find a female to male swap harder to write. However, that still probably wouldn't account for just how big the difference is, so there may well be some underlying social/cultural factors at play here*

On the cultural side of explanations, it's worth noting that this disproportion of examples seems to be reflected when it comes to transgendered characters. Specifically, transmale character are far, far, less common than transfemale ones. Whether this correlation stems from any similar factors or is just coincidental I don't know.



*IIRC there does exist something of a male-to-female gender swap fetish group but I'm not sure if that accounts for much outside of webcomics. Then again, rather a lot of gender-swap examples do seem to come from the world of webcomics...

MISFILE

How did no one mention Misfile. It handles this kind of thing rather seriously.

Probably because that webcomic is (like practically every gender swap webcomic in existence) about someone who is male being turned female. I'll grant that it's handled somewhat better than some other webcomics I've webcomics I've had the misfortune of encountering, but it's still not a relevant example.

But they HAVE done it the other way. Shakespeare did it for crying out loud.

Granted, in Twelfth Knight, Viola doesn't become a man so much as disguise herself as one

In other words, it isn't an example of a female to male gender-swap.

I've seen Escaflowne, and as I recall, this one really seemed to come out of nowhere in the second-to-last episode. It brought on one of those collective "WTF?!?" moments in our group. Still, it qualifies, I guess.

It is actually hinted at a bit earlier in the series, but it very much a surprise plot twist/reveal (one that I unfortunately had spoiled for me a good while before it came-up). I'd be a bit hesitant about including it even it weren't a massive spoiler.

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I mean, it's less a case of a character being turned into a different gender as it was a character who had been turned into a different person (without any memories of who they'd been previously) who was of the opposite sex.

[Serpentine]

I didn't say that thing, DeepBlueDiver

But under the old single sex model, the two are largely the same. There are many parables of women acting like men and spontaneously changing.

Making Sex strikes again!

1. What single sex model, and are you really saying that Mulan would have been the same story if instead of dressing like a man, she'd been physically and involuntarily turned into one?
2. What parables? I feel like there's a niggling vague memory from ancient Greek myth, but that's certainly not "many". If you know of some I would be interested in hearing about them.

[Kitten Champion]

Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light has its post humans interject themselves into the bodies of their sex, age, and morphology of their choosing. As a form of literal reincarnation.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline deals with sexual and racial embodiment issues within the virtual reality which the novel is based around.

I'm sure there are more post-human or cyberpunk science fiction which has sex swapping of all kinds that I simply can't remember. It's was a pretty common theme in second wave Science Fiction.

2. What parables? I feel like there's a niggling vague memory from ancient Greek myth, but that's certainly not "many". If you know of some I would be interested in hearing about them.

Dionysus, Loki, and other trickster gods have a masculine persona and yet are depicted as easily breaking the boundaries of sexual dimorphism.

[Serpentine]

That's true... But they're not (or not usually) involuntary, and are still male-to-female, not female-to-male.

[Kitten Champion]

That's true... But they're not (or not usually) involuntary, and are still male-to-female, not female-to-male.

True, they aren't involuntary.

Still, the fact that they're depicted as gods rather than goddesses in the first place seems to be more a matter of semantics and general masculine bias. They're sexually ambiguous, or rather, outside the concept of sex.

[PlusSixPelican]

Ah! I've got it. This counts going both ways, buuuuut here you go.

Tiresias.

Tiresias was a man and a woman, and then a man again. Magically. His only children (to my knowledge, anyways) came from a relationship he had as a woman, and from his then-time womb. So, his tale does include being a woman turned into a man, and I *think* he admitted to finding sex more enjoyable as a woman. This is probably the oldest story with that going on.

Straight examples of it being a literal addition of a Y chromosome via magic...well, I remember it in The Wotch and EGS. EGS even had a whole arc about a gender-swapping birthday party where the whole cast does it, including a character getting insight into the male gender by spending some time as a guy. That was pretty interesting.

[The_Snark]

3) Men wanting to dress up as a women to avoid doing something manly or to get access to somewhere men aren't normally allowed (this last one goes all the way back to greek literature, with Achilles and Odysseus, though most recent works play it for comedy)

They played it for comedy too. Greek comedies aren't nearly as well known as the tragedies, for some reason. Possibly they don't age well as well?

I'm sure there are more post-human or cyberpunk science fiction which has sex swapping of all kinds that I simply can't remember. It was a pretty common theme in second wave Science Fiction.

Yeah, but it's generally undertaken voluntarily, which is not quite what this topic is about; it's simply a form of high-tech transsexual procedure. There's a narrow subgenre of story in which a guy is turned into a girl against his will, and has to deal with his/her new gender role. The reverse, in which a girl is unwillingly turned male, is much less common.

Much as I like Lord of Light, it doesn't fit those parameters (Brahma and Mara are perfectly capable of returning to female bodies if they want), nor do any other science fiction works I can think of off the top of my head*. There are some interesting explorations of sexuality and the changing thereof out there, though I'm not sure Zelazny would be my first choice for that.

*Not a comprehensive list by any means

[Bulldog Psion]

Well, I think that it could be interesting have a gender swap from female to male cause problems, but I'm not sure that it could be done nowadays without creating a lot of hatred for the author who undertook it. After all, it's received wisdom at the moment that it's perfect and wonderful to be a guy, and horrible to be a girl. I'm not sure how the trope could be inverted without stepping on so many toes that the writer would never be published again.

[Beacon of Chaos]

Well there's .hack//Sign... kinda...

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One of the main characters, Tsukasa, is a girl playing as a male character in a virtual MMO. She ends up getting trapped in the game, unable to escape because her real body is in a coma.

It's been a while since I've seen it, so I don't really remember how much the gender swap was actually brought up.

[Mx.Silver]

Well, I think that it could be interesting have a gender swap from female to male cause problems, but I'm not sure that it could be done nowadays without creating a lot of hatred for the author who undertook it. After all, it's received wisdom at the moment that it's perfect and wonderful to be a guy, and horrible to be a girl. I'm not sure how the trope could be inverted without stepping on so many toes that the writer would never be published again.

I don't think this would be as big a problem as you seem to think. For a start the idea that 'being female is worse than being male' has been pretty well entrenched since Aristotle's day and has pretty much been fixture of western civilisation since. The only difference 'nowadays' as you put it, is that currently the reasoning for it is that women face more sexist discrimination than men, whereas previously it was based on the notion that women were just plain inferior to men so it would suck if a man was forced to 'downgrade'.
Given this, the question is who exactly would be getting offended by it? Wouldn't that depend on how it was handled? I mean, if it is widely accepted that men generally suffer less sex-based discrimination than women, then why would a story that reflected that create a lot of hatred? Logically, it just doesn't follow.

Furthermore, male-to-female gender swaps can be (and sometimes are) just as offensive as the reverse could be, mostly in regards to stereotypes about women (and men, to a lesser extent). It is not uncommon to see such changed characters having to deal with being more prone to tears and emotional outbursts because 'that's what women are like' and this is apparently some cast-iron rule of biology. Less common, but still existent, are instances where the originally male character has been left physically weaker or just less capable by the change because apparently biology dictates that the man who could previously have qualified as an Olympic weight-lifter will now struggle to match any reasonably in-shape human male now that he's a woman. You also occasionally get instances where the gender swap results in the character changing sexual orientation (which opens a whole new can of worms) and let's not get into the fact that male-to-female gender swaps frequently seem to end-up getting very similar female body types regardless of what they looked like as men (especially in webcomics).

None of this though seems to have prevent the existence of those stories, which ties-in to the final problem. Namely, being offensive or controversial is in no way guaranteed to make the work 'unpublishable'. Especially when you consider that controversy can often translate into free publicity.

[comicshorse]

In his 'League of Extraordinary Gentleman' series Alan Moore uses a version of Orlando ( from the novel by Virginia Woolf) who slowly cycles between the genders as the decades pass

[Astrella]

Well, I think that it could be interesting have a gender swap from female to male cause problems, but I'm not sure that it could be done nowadays without creating a lot of hatred for the author who undertook it. After all, it's received wisdom at the moment that it's perfect and wonderful to be a guy, and horrible to be a girl. I'm not sure how the trope could be inverted without stepping on so many toes that the writer would never be published again.

Oppositional sexism is a thing as well, ask any trans* man if they don't suffer discrimination. >.> Also way to completely distort gender inequality there. It doesn't mean that stuff is super awesome for men and sucky for others. Firstly there's other axes along which there is prejudice and discrimination such as class, race, ability, orientation, whether you're cis or trans, etc.... Each gender faces unique issues.

[Tvtyrant]

I didn't say that thing, DeepBlueDiver 1. What single sex model, and are you really saying that Mulan would have been the same story if instead of dressing like a man, she'd been physically and involuntarily turned into one?
2. What parables? I feel like there's a niggling vague memory from ancient Greek myth, but that's certainly not "many". If you know of some I would be interested in hearing about them.

1. The older Greek model of the sexes placed women as incomplete men, with inward turned male organs. In effect the women lacked the vital "heat" that made men male, but if that heat was introduced it was possible for a woman to spontaneously become a man.

I'm not saying that at all. The thread was about people magically switching genders and how there is a dearth of female to male swaps, and I was pointing out that there were once more in that way.

2.The book I referenced in white in my post ("Making Sex") has quite a few from ancient and medieval times.

I have to go to work now, but I will leaf through the book and find some of them for you when I have time. One of my favorites is a young woman who jumped a ditch and became a man in the process!

[willpell]

My mom has a TV movie of a rather crappy movie about a high school girl who gets turned into one of the football jocks. You couldn't pay me to watch the thing, but I'll look up the title when I get a chance. The OP is right that this trope is VERY rare.

In general our society affords men most of the real advantages (see: glass ceiling) but credits women with most of the putative ones (see: chivalry), so there's very little storytelling "cred" inherent in turning for example Zelda, who everyone wants a piece of but who never actually has to do anything, into Link or Ganon, both of whom have the actual story revolving around them. Plus of course none of the powerbrokers of our society are big on the idea of turning a microscope on the way our culture sanctions casual brutality to males (the "rat race" and various highly competitive high-pressure environments, from the office to the army, with very few examples that are not either wholly male or grudgingly egalitarian) by inducting a person into that culture who hasn't been raised in it...the result might result in too many members of the labor force questioning what they've been taught to believe is okay.

Without getting into ANY specifics for obvious COC reasons, I think one of the most interesting ways to explore a FTM story would be to put it in some strict religious community where both genders are placed under a lot of expectations (and probably market the result to members of loosely related communities who would appreciate it more than the mainstream). Another possibility would be to take one of the relatively few arenas where there is a very strong pro-female prejudice: child custody battles, which nearly always break in favor of the mother if she is not overwhelmingly less suitable. You could make a real tear-jerker tale out of a woman whose husband switches bodies with her in order to take their child away (ideally setting this 10-20 years back when nobody even really thought to question that the child belonged with its mother; feminism was new enough back then that the counterbalancing idea that men's rights might actually be in danger hadn't really even been thought of, let alone talked about).

[Mono Vertigo]

Well there's .hack//Sign... kinda...

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One of the main characters, Tsukasa, is a girl playing as a male character in a virtual MMO. She ends up getting trapped in the game, unable to escape because her real body is in a coma.

It's been a while since I've seen it, so I don't really remember how much the gender swap was actually brought up.

One of the interesting part about it is

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that she actually doesn't seem to remember most of her real life while stuck in the game, at least at first. Her actual sex/gender are among those lost memories, and she believes she's a guy, like her character.

[willpell]

My mom has a TV movie of a rather crappy movie about a high school girl who gets turned into one of the football jocks. You couldn't pay me to watch the thing, but I'll look up the title when I get a chance.

Found it: Equinox Knocks. I reiterate that I have not seen it and know nothing about it beyond the back-cover blurb, but at least that much tells me it fits the topic.

[Scorpina]

I saw a film (I think on the Sci-Fi Channel) years and years ago, which I believe was called 'Virtual Sexuality' about a girl using a crazy machine that was designed for makeovers to design the 'perfect man' and then accidentally becoming said man. It was dumb and very cheesy indeed, but I do seem to remember enjoying it.

I may or may not have been drinking at the time.