Animal Gender Bender/Playing With

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:
  • Joey has not only a pouch, but also an udder, antlers, colorful feathers, mane, and/or any other trait linked only to one sex of a given species.
  • Alternatively, Joey is a scientific experiment capable of male pregnancy.
• 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.

---

Back to Animal Gender Bender