A common storyline for this type of universe is to portray society as a matriarchy with men being considered the weaker sex, allowing writers to point out certain double standards in how men and women are treated. Of course this inevitably results in more double standards and writers tend to write the gender swapped versions of characters differently to how the normal versions are written.
Sub-Trope of Distaff Counterpart and Bizarro Universe, where it's just the sexes of characters that are changed. See also Rule 63, which would only apply when this trope occurs in fanworks.
Not a Gender Bender sub-trope, as this is about an entire universe where everyone was always the opposite sex of what they were in another. They can still overlap, for instance, if one universe is created from/turn into the other and some characters can remember the difference.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- One of the special chapters of ARIA took place in an alternate universe where Undines are a male only profession. President Aria somehow got stuck in this universe and spent the whole day dealing with opposite sex versions of the whole cast.
- The Black Lagoon omake for volume four has Rock inexplicably wake up as a woman, only to discover everyone else is the opposite gender he knew them as (though their names are the same) and remembers things always being that way. After Rock mistakenly believes Revy is still a woman, he pulls his shorts down to disprove it, and the comic abruptly ends without any kind of resolution,
- Maid-Sama!: "The Student Council President is a Butler!" omake flips everyone's gender.
- In Spirit Circle, looks like this is where Fuuko lives. Her life is explicitly stated to take place in an alternate universe of Fuuta's life, and she's the only one of his incarnations who is female. It also shows us her version of Fuuta's friends, all of which are also the opposite gender of their other incarnations.
- Urusei Yatsura: In one anime-original episode, Lum gets transported into a dimension where she briefly meets Gender-bent versions of Megane, the rest of the Lum stormtroopers, Ryuunouske and her(his) father(mother).
- A bonus panel for the manga of My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! has the main characters as the opposite gender. In the anime, an original episode has the main cast sent in worlds based on their secret wishes, with Keith Claes's wish to be reborn as a girl so he can understand how normal girls think. This leads to a fantasy world where not only is he a girl, but everyone is the opposite gender as well.
Comic Books
- One arc of The Authority saw the team visit an alternate universe where everyone had the opposite gender of their counterpart in the main Wildstorm universe, and where gender roles were reversed. Jack Hawksmoor walked away disturbed at the sight of his counterpart being heavily pregnant and saying he definitely doesn't want to know who the father is.
- In Avengers Forever (2021), one of the many alternate Earths whose heroic history was wiped out when the Multiversal Masters of Evil killed the Avengers 1,000,000 BC is Earth-5478, where they include female versions of Odin, the first Black Panther and Agamotto, plus a male counterpart to Firehair the Phoenix. Ghost Rider is still male, and the Starbrand bearer is a sabretooth. It's also mentioned that, had the All-Mother lived, she would have had a daughter named Thor.
- In The Multiversity, the DC Universe's Earth-11 is basically "Earth-Gender Flip", with all the major characters swapped. Most of them are gender-flipped versions of existing characters, but some play with the concept in some way, eg Batwoman is still Kate Kane, but in Batman's position; the Green Lantern counterpart is Star Sapphire, but her real name is Carol Jordan; and The Flash counterpart is Jesse Quick. And Jesse's sidekick Kid Quick is nonbinary.
- The concept of a genderbend universe first appeared in Superman #349 (July 1980), which was created by Mr. Mxyzptlk to trick Superman into thinking he somehow ended up in another universe. It ends up failing because Superwoman and Clara Kent exists as separate people (and found that Mxy is still male in this world).
- A Double Standard has often occurred with Wonder Woman's counterpart Dane of Elysium/Wonderous Man, where he is portrayed as a villain along with the male Amazons. Despite Wonder Woman being seen as the embodiment of female empowerment and Earth-11's gender swapped society logically meaning that men would have been treated as the weaker sex in this world, Wonderous Man is instead is always portrayed as a He-Man Woman Hater Straw Misogynist who is trying to invade "Woman's World".
- In Web Warriors, one of the alternate universes is a world where everyone's gender, name, and moral alignment is opposite of their Earth-616 counterpart. It is the home of Octavia Otto.
- Exiles had this show up from time to time, though typically as one offs where the team jaunted through for a couple panels but didn't have a great deal of plot relevance.
- The Star Trek (IDW) storyline "Parallel Lives" featured an alternate universe in which Jane T. Kirk was captain of the Enterprise, with her crew including Ms Spock, Dr Lea McCoy, Nnamdi Uhuro, Marjorie Scott, Jason Rand, Hiraki Sulu, Pavlovna Chekov, Carl Marcus, and so on. Jane reappears, along with many other alternate Kirks, in "IDIC".
- X-Men:
- In X of Swords, the new Captain Britain Corps is based around Betsy Braddock rather than Brian. There are still a few male Captains. They may not all be male Betsys, but the one with a purple beard almost certainly is.
- In Uncanny X-Men #462, Saturnyne's bodyguards (the Executive Action Committee) consists of male versions of Psylocke, Jean Grey, Polaris, Rogue, Storm, and Kitty Pryde, all from Earth-59222. Psylocke's reaction to meeting 616 Brian Braddock is "So this is what my sister looks like as a man?"
Fan Works
- On a Cross and Arrow has one such universe parallel to Equestria. The mane six are sent there by a spell gone awry, and spend most of the story hiding from their male counterparts.
- In Brothers of Thunder
, a spin-off to Infinity Crisis, Thor and Jane Foster of Earth-19999, along with their counterparts from The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes and Avengers Assemble (including the Avengers from the latter series), end up in one designated Earth-911111.
- Project Naruko is set in a universe where everyone in Naruto is born the opposite gender.
- "Yet Another Time Round" is a genderflipped version of Doctor Who's This Time Round meta-setting.
- The Coffin of Roboute and His 20 Sisters has Roboute Guilliman sent back in time to an alternate universe where the Primarchs are all female. It's explained to him by his Exodite allies that Cegorach could only successfully send him back in time (a domain his godly duties don't normally fall under) if the end result could be viewed from an outsider perspective as a "jest" (which does fall under his portfolio), hence why it had to be a genderbent universe where most other things have remained the same in order for his future knowledge to still have relevance.
Literature
- In the book series "The Magical States of America", there is an alternate universe where every person from "our" universe has a gender-swapped counterpart in a world that runs on magic instead of science.
- The Twilight one-shot book Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined is set in an alternate universe where the major characters are genderflipped; Bella Swan becomes Beaufort Swan, Edward Cullen becomes Edythe Cullen, Jacob Black becomes Julie Black, etc. Not everyone is genderflipped, though; Beaufort still moves to Forks to live with his father after his mother remarried.
Live-Action TV
- The Malcolm in the Middle episode "If Girls Were Boys" deconstructs this: while Lois fantasizes about how the problems would be far less common if she had all girls instead of boys (when she was pregnant with Jamie), by the end she realizes that both genders have their problems—if she had girls, she might wish they were boys instead. As Lois's fantasy world spiraled out of control, her "daughters" point out that they're like this because as women they have a better understanding of the way Lois thinks and can figure out ways to fool or undermine her much more efficiently than the boys do.
- The Red Dwarf episode appropriately titled "Parallel Universe" features gender-bent versions of most of the main characters (except for the cat; his parallel-universe equivalent is a dog). Also, in this parallel universe, men are the ones that can get pregnant, resulting in women being the dominant gender (Wilma Shakespeare was the most famous writer in that universe, while Nellie Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon). However, the gender gap has closed since the 1960s thanks to the efforts of masculists like Jeremy Greer. The episode makes a point of acknowledging how Lister and Rimmer don't find their female counterparts attractive despite the fact that all their pick-up lines are what they would use on women, with the female Rimmer objectifying her male counterpart the same way he does with the female Lister. The episode also has the female Rimmer slut-shame Lister after he sleeps with his counterpart, and since in this universe men give birth, Lister gets to experience his counterpart's attitude that it was his responsibility to take precautions.
- Sliders: The antagonist of the episode "Double Cross", Logan St. Claire, is revealed towards the end to be the double of main character Quinn Mallory. This is their first time encountering such a situation, as the Sliders' doubles have typically been just that, doubles.
Quinn: That's impossible. How can my double be a woman?
Arturo: It is the difference between an X- and Y-chromosome, Mr. Mallory.
Podcasts
- Red Panda Adventures: In "The World Next Door", the Red Panda and Flying Squirrel meet Baboon MacSmoothie, a traveler from an alternate timeline's future, there to steal something from the past without causing a paradox. During his visit, it's learned his world is vastly different from the main universe. Among other things, the Flying Squirrel was a teenage boy named Kent Baxter, rather than an adult woman named Kit Baxter. Kit tells the Panda that "Kent" would have been her name had she been a boy. A later reference to this world mentions a male villain called the "Necromator", who the Red Panda assumed is a gender flip of one of his own Rogues' Gallery villainess, Professor Zombie.
Tabletop Games
- Implied in Super Munchkin with the "alternate dimension version" card, which changes the sex of a player character.
Video Games
- A staple of the Fate Series, which features gender-bent versions of popular figures from history, folklore, and urban legend. Despite this, the trope is inverted with its signature character, Artoria Pendragon— our universe's "Arthur" is a female, but the male Arthur comes from a parallel world.
- Shovel Knight has Body Swap Mode, which does this for every character in the game.
Web Animation
- Eddsworld had the episode "Mirror, Mirror" in which there was a world with female versions of the main cast connected by Matt and Matilda's magical mirrors.
Web Comics
- Ennui GO! features a short run of strips in a gender-flipped alternate universe. The characters' roles and personalities were generally unchanged, although the feminine version of Noah had gigantic boobs instead of the regular Noah's Gag Penis, and the male version of Sarah had a thick mustache.
- Parodied in Val and Isaac.Val quickly got fed up of being "Girl Val" when the other Vals got together to solve a crisis (the other characters have a more or less even gender ratio across the multiverse).
- Real Life Comics features some storylines that feature either visiting one of these dimensions or the counterparts from that dimension travelling to the comic's main dimension.note
Western Animation
- Adventure Time has a gender-bent universe that is the main setting of Ice King's stories. Examples include Fionna, a gender-bent Finn, and Cake who is a female cat that is the counterpart of Jake the Dog.
- Johnny Test: The episode "Johnny Alternative" revolves around Johnny and Dukey being sent to an alternate universe where everyone, including the duo, is the opposite gender (Johnny Test -> Joni West, Dukey -> Duchy, Eugene -> Eugenia, Susan Test -> Simon West, Mister Mittens -> Madame Mittens, etc.)
- Subverted in The Loud House episode "One of the Boys", where there seems to be a world where Lincoln's sisters have turned into brothers, Clyde and Bobby have turned into girls, and eventually Lincoln turns into a girl himself, but it turns out to be All Just a Dream.
- SheZow has Gal/DudePow, a Distaff Counterpart of Guy / SheZow from an alternate universe. There are also other characters in that alternate universe who are gender-flipped as well.
- In Ultimate Spider-Man, Spider-Man travels to an alternate universe where all the characters are gender-flipped. He meets his female counterpart, Petra Parker. This version of Earth is seemingly matriarchal, with Peter given a Stay in the Kitchen attitude from Petra. They still manage to work together to fight both his Green Goblin and her Green Goblin.
