Multi-Gendered Split Personalities

Split Personalities are weird things. They can have completely opposing personality traits to the main personality, different skills sometimes... But perhaps one of the oddest from a logical standpoint is when a split personality is actually a different gender from the main personality and from the body they control.

How exactly they rationalize this gender incongruity can vary and tends to depend on Alternate Identity Amnesia. Some may see their own body as fitting their perceived sex. Some may simply ignore it. Some may consider themselves transgender. Some may believe their body was physically changed when they were unconscious (which the audience may be led to believe as well). Every mental coping mechanism will be a brain-twister, however.

Mixing in actual forms of Gender Bender can add a new layer of complexity: A personality fronting may involve an extreme Split-Personality Makeover where the body changes sex to match them. Conversely, when The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body, the dysphoria brought on by a transformation can cause dissociated identities of different gender. And this is without getting into opposite sex individuals that ended up Sharing a Body.

Compare Super Gender-Bender for when your other gender split personality has superpowers.

Truth in Television for real-world multiples (including but not limited to Dissociative Identity Disorder), for whom this is a very normal, routine occurrence along with selves of different races, ages and even species coexisting.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Forty from A.I. Love You is an A.I. with a female body but two different personalities, one that is a boy and one that is a girl. The personality change is triggered when Forty says "boy" or "girl". This happened because Forty's "older sisters" were having a dispute over having a little brother or a little sister, so they messed with Forty's gender and personality settings before Forty was ready. Funnily enough, the personality traits got switched around so the boy personality is gentle and neat while the girl personality is hyperactive and naughty.
• The manga Fukigen Cinderella is about a young man who starts changing sex every day at noon and midnight. Eventually, they end up not only Living a Double Life spread across opposite forms, but dissociating male and female identities as a result. The ending has the two halves physically separating spontaneously, apparently from the ensuing angst. In the published version this was a dramatic cliffhanger, but the volume version adds a few pages showing it resolved all the protagonists' conflict in a comically abrupt fashion.
• Hato, the Wholesome Crossdresser of Genshiken is male but has a female inside voice/spirit/personality/whatever, teasing him each time he is with Madarame, much to his annoyance.
• Kotonoha Nanase from Gun×Clover has seven different personalities which protect her primary personality, who has been targeted since childhood because of a unique ability to read dead languages. Her fifth personality is a Hot-Blooded male martial artist named Itsuba.
• Though the protagonist of Inside Mari starts off believing he's a man named Isao who woke up in the body of a girl named Mari, there's an alternate implication that Isao is just Mari's split personality. This is ultimately proven as true, though there is a real Isao the personality is based on; Mari is his Stalker without a Crush, which is why the personality knows so many of his private details. Apparently, the Isao personality was an attempt by Mari to cast off her attraction to other girls. However, Mari turns out to be another split personality, of the natural personality Fumiko, created due to a combination of childhood traumas and her mother forcibly changing her name.
• Shiho from Jitsu wa Watashi wa is normally a sexy Shameless Fanservice Girl, but she's also a half-werewolf. In this setting, her werewolf side manifests as a Split Personality named Shiro, who is a guy. When she switches, her body changes from a busty girly body to Shiro's rugged one.
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (1999) makes Sheik a separate personality, rather than just a Secret Identity. Seven years ago, Zelda allowed Impa to put her consciousness to sleep and replace it with a boy named Sheik.
• The protagonist of Love Stage!! is Izumi, an otaku from a prominent family of actors and music talents, who is cast in a TV Drama as the main character, a rich young master with three personalities, one of which is a girl. This difficult role shows off Izumi's prodigious but heretofore unseen acting abilities, causing feelings of inadequacy in his senior co-star and boyfriend, Ryouma.
• The title character of Maze Megaburst Space changes sex by time of day (female by day, male at night), and each body has a separate personality of corresponding gender. Maze's female identity is mild-mannered and averse to violence, while the male identity is lecherous, hot-headed, and eager to fight. Originally, they were regular siblings named Mei and Akira who were merged together.
• While not exactly a split personality, the three-headed dragon Jida from Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid has two male heads and one female one. This has some rather interesting effects when they take on human form, because their appearance shifts depending on which one is in control.
• In the shoujo rom-com manga Wake Up, Sleeping Beauty, a high school student named Tetsu befriends a recluse girl named Shizu as part of his part-time job, later learning that she's prone to blacking out and acting differently at times. While the premise is initially set up to make him believe she has split personalities, it's more accurate to say that her body is housing multiple deceased spirits who are all trying to help Shizu in her own way. This trope kicks in when Tetsu realizes that three of the four souls that inhabit Shizu's body at alternating times while she sleeps are male: her great-grandfather Shinobu, the athletic uncle-like figure Haru and the energetic grade schooler Kanato. The fourth spirit, the fashion-loving Mirei, is the sole female of the bunch.
  • A later clarification image shows how each of them dresses up as a way of further allowing Tetsu to distinguish who is controlling Shizu at the time. Mirei wears the most trendy clothes as befitting her background (she's also responsible for dressing the boys up properly as well), Shinobu uses more traditional feminine clothing mainly to ensure his great-granddaughter is presentable at all times and wears reading glaases, Haru is often seen in sports and workout gear along with tying Shizu's hair up in a ponytail, and Kanato dresses exactly like how a grade school boy would dress in spite of his host body's gender.
• The former spirit detective Shinobu Sensui from YuYu Hakusho has developed no less than 7 identities, one of which is a girl called Naru, who represents the last remnants of his innocence.

Fan Works

• Linnéa in We Are All Pokémon Trainers shares a body with her male split personality, Ray, who was formed out of her desire for a protector from her abusive mother.
• Ranko in Lost Together is implied to slowly develop into an independent alter, exploring her femininity and falling in love with a boy. Judging by Ranma's brief appearance in their shared headspace, he's pretty unhappy about that and seeks to front again before Ranko can further "wreck everything".
• Downplayed in Three's A Crowd (Naruto). Sakura's body is inhabited by herself, the likewise female Inner Sakura, and the male Naruto. However, Naruto isn't a native alter of Sakura's, instead being the consciousness of the actual Naruto that somehow became intertwined with her mind following his death at the beginning of the story.

Film — Live-Action

• An in-universe example in Adaptation., in which Donald's inane psychological thriller screenplay The Thr3e ends with the reveal that the cop protagonist, the killer he is chasing after and the female victim the cop falls in love with are all the same person. Donald chooses to cheerfully ignore all of the Contrived Coincidences and Plot Holes created by this plot twist.
• The main character from Doctor Jekyll and Sister Hyde is a man whose Hyde is a woman.
• In Identity, the ending reveals that all of the ten main characters, consisting of seven males and three women, are alternate personalities of Malcolm Rivers.
• In the famous twist ending from Psycho it turns out that Norman Bates' mother is long since dead, but Norman has a split personality who he thinks of as his mother. Even more creepily, we actually hear Norman talk in her voice near the end of the film.
• In the movie Peacock, the painfully shy John (Cillian Murphy) has a more confident female personality named Emma who makes him breakfast and lays out his clothes every day, like a wife would — which is precisely what everyone thinks she is when she is accidentally discovered. The personalities are aware of one another, but they have no memory of the other's experiences. John gets increasingly panicked as Emma begins to 'control' him more, and Emma eventually 'murders' John by staging his death and presenting as Emma only.
• Carter in Raising Cain has several split personalities, who are leftovers from the research he went through as a child. One of them is a quiet, intimidating woman named Margo, who takes over to make him escape the police, and go after the real villain of the story.
• A sub-plot in Session 9 revolves around a psychiatric patient named Mary Hobbes, who suffered from dissociative identity disorder and had three "alters" named The Princess, Billy and Simon. Billy and Simon sound very masculine and have masculine names while The Princess sounds more feminine. The film leaves it deliberately ambiguous whether this is actually a case of dissociative identity disorder or Demonic Possession.
• In Split, at least two of Kevin's 23 personalities are women. One of them, Jade, gets very little screentime but is diabetic and needs insulin injections (which none of the others do,), while another, Patricia, is one of the main antagonists of the film and acts as an Evil Matriarch to several of the other dangerous alters. It's hinted that Patricia not only considers herself female, but may actually perceive Kevin's (physically male) body as female when she is in control; at one point, when she takes over from a male personality who had no problem with Kevin being a Walking Shirtless Scene, she immediately covers her chest.
  • Glass (2019) adds a third, Felida, the personality of a Latino woman.

Literature

• Discworld:
  • The Truth introduces Altogether Andrews, a beggar with no less than 8 different personalities, one of which - named Lady Hermione - is female. They activate at random, and can apparently communicate with one another. And none of them respond to "Andrews".
  • Carpe Jugulum has Nanny Ogg remember dealing with a man who had seven personalities, three of which were female. The "primary" (male) personality claimed the other six just paired off in the back of his head and left him to get on with things.
• Assassin from Fate/Zero is primarily male, but two of the personalities that can manifest alongside the other personas are a woman named "Asako" and a young girl with no name. As of Fate/Grand Order, Hundred-Faced Assassin is treated as female instead of non-binary, and Asako is their default personality, although masculine personas such as Zayd and Makul appear in attack animations and some quests.
• The entire Ryougi bloodline in The Garden of Sinners is capable of developing this if a specific ritual is performed when they're infants. The heir of the family, Shiki, had a male personality called "SHIKI" until a car accident kills him off . This impacted her a lot to the point that she's taken to adopting many of his behaviors and mannerisms as a way to remember him; given that SHIKI acted like any normal teenage boy despite being having a female body, this led to Shiki's shift into harder Tomboy territory.
• When Rabbit Howls, the autobiography of Truddi Chase and her Troops, matter-of-factly describes both male and female selves, different ages and races. One of the powerful protective selves was Mean Joe Greene, a huge black man. Chase was physically a white woman.
• In Fear Hall, a two-part story from the Fear Street series, Hope Mathis developed four alternate personalities thanks to the horrific abuse she endured from her mother alongside Hope's crippling loneliness. Her first three alters were her friends Eden, Jasmine, and Angel, while her fourth alter is Darryl, her "boyfriend." Hope's girl friends were created due to her extreme loneliness, while Darryl manifested after Hope learned the boy she liked seemingly went out with her after losing a bet. The three girl alters are supportive and rational, while Darryl is abusive and a danger to every living thing around Hope.

Live-Action TV

• Bates Motel, as a TV prequel to Psycho, has Vera Farmiga playing both the real Norma Bates and Norman's manipulative secondary personality "Mother".
• In one episode of Criminal Minds, the Serial Killer they're looking for isn't quite their prime suspect, a man named Adam; it's actually his alter, a woman named Amanda. Despite her personality existing in Adam's male body, s/he is enough of an Attractive Bent-Gender for her to successfully seduce her (male) targets before killing them. Once she's found out as the killer, Amanda performs a Split-Personality Takeover.
• In a House episode, a girl develops an alternate personality whom she considers her "boyfriend". Oddly enough, she tests positive for pregnancy and the doctors think he got her pregnant, which doesn't turn out to be true.
• One Law & Order episode revolved around a male-bodied system with a seemingly all-male crew, but there was a single female member who, unbeknownst to the guys, protected them from the person abusing them. In another story, a female had a male self to protect her from her abuser. Again, she would black out when he showed up, so had no knowledge of what he did; both episodes hinged on how much proof of the diagnosis there was and whether they could make an Insanity Defense.
• One Life to Live. One of heroine Viki's alternate personalities was an angry teenage boy. And after she finally remembered that her father had sexually abused her from age 7 to young adulthood, he became one of her personalities too. This isn't unheard of for real multiples.
  • When her younger brother Todd faked DID to get off on criminal charges, one of the personalities he created was a woman.
• Psych:
  • In the episode "Who Ya Gonna Call?", Shawn and Gus are hired by a client who turns out to have multiple personalities. One of them is a woman who has been trying to arrange a sex change behind the (male) primary's back, another is a murderous psychopath who kills the doctors the female alter has been going to.
  • In another episode, Gus falls for an extremely attractive woman... at a mental hospital. Eventually, he learns that she is sharing a body with another personality named "Frank".
• United States of Tara is about a woman with DID named Tara Gregson and her multiple personalities, one of whom is a man named Buck who claims to have lost his "member" in 'Nam.
  • Another male alter, Bryce, manifests in season three.
• In an episode of The X-Files there was a woman who claimed to have a Split Personality; one of the personalities was male.

Video Games

• In Killer7, KAEDE is one of the many split personalities of Harman Smith and the only female one. The appearance and physical characteristics change to match that of the personality in charge though, and it's never made totally clear how these personalities came about in the first place as the game is one big Mind Screw.
• Alyssa, the female protagonist of Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within, has a male split personality called Bates, who even has a completely different and more masculine voice when he’s fronting. Near the end of the game, it’s revealed that the Bates personality is a manifestation of the ghost of Alyssa’s twin brother, who was Buried Alive by his parents due to fear of a curse, which ironically is probably why he’s so dangerous as Alyssa’s other self.
• Platinum the Trinity, the Magical Girl Token Mini-Moe of BlazBlue, has three personalities in control of her body. While two of those - the abrasive Luna and the motherly Trinity - are female and match, the third is that of the meek Sena, who identifies as male.
• The ending of Elden Ring reveals Marika and Radagon, who were thus far established as wife and husband, are in some way the same being. How isn't entirely clear, but it appears they are separate personalities (at least currently) Sharing a Body that changes sex and other features to match who is in control. They also aren't cooperative with each other, as Marika shattered the Elden Ring and Radagon is trying to repair it.

Visual Novels

• Uendo Toneido from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice suffers from dissociative identity disorder. Most of his personalities are male, but one of them, Kisegawa, is a female courtesan (the game even switches to the higher-pitched text blips used for female characters when said personality takes over).
• When They Cry:
  • Umineko: When They Cry has a variant of this: Kanon and Shannon are actually alter egos of Sayo Yasuda, and while they're played as a single person leading a double life rather than DID per se, the way in which the personas are used to dramatize their inner conflict borrows a lot from classic split personality tropes. While the backstory as revealed in Episode 7 leaves the precise circumstances of their upbringing with respect to gender ambiguous, some unreliable narration would suggest they were male at birth.
  • Ciconia: When They Cry has a more straightforward example when an early game twist reveals that protagonist Mitake Miyao has a little sister alter by the name of Meow. So far, this has largely been in service of a lighthearted love triangle in which a male squadmate finds himself taken with the both of them, but it's one factor in Miyao's mounting discomfort with existence as a physical being as a whole. While they're both private about the details of their sex, it can be inferred through flashbacks that they were raised as a boy.

Webcomics

• When we get a look inside Elliot's brain in this El Goonish Shive strip, a couple of his personality facets (judging by the dialogue, his shyness and his curiosity) are female, while the rest (confusion, ego, libido, and in the last panel conscience) are male. The oddness of this is explicitly pointed out in an alternate version of the relevant panel.

Western Animation

• Total Drama: Svetlana is Mike's only female alter. She's a Russian gymnast triggered by athletic challenges, and whenever she fronts, Mike's face suddenly appears to have lipstick and mascara.
• Wander over Yonder: The episode "The Wanders" involves a magical crystal splitting Wander's aspects of his personality into 420 different Wanders. One of the Wanders has long blonde hair and eyelashes. Sylvia pulls a pretend tea party to lure her in to get back the original Wander.

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