Basic Trope: A person impersonating the opposite gender has difficulty due to differing gender roles in society.
- Straight:
- Due to a Zany Scheme, Bob must disguise himself as Alice to interact with some people who've never met her. He has difficulty walking in high heels, sitting in a short skirt, and accidentally walks into the wrong restroom.
- Alice disguises herself as Bob and has trouble acting manly.
- Exaggerated: Even though Bob has been physically transformed into Alice, the above problems remain in force—he can't even figure out how to button his blouse straight, because the buttons are on the wrong side. If Bob is speaking a gendered language like Japanese, he keeps using masculine speech instead of feminine.
- Downplayed:
- Bob comes across as more butch than Alice is supposed to be.
- Alice comes across as more effeminate than Bob is supposed to be.
- Justified: Bob has never tried to impersonate a woman before and has never studied their behavior with an eye to imitation.
- Inverted:
- Bob is an Instant Expert at impersonating women, looking and behaving so naturally feminine that when the real Alice shows up, she's accused of being a man in disguise.
- Bob has always been considered effeminate, and fits in better as Alice.
- Subverted: It looks like this trope is in play for the first couple of minutes, until Bob hits his stride and encounters no further difficulties.
- Double Subverted: Until the end of the meeting, when he does something so unmistakably masculine that there's no question what's going on.
- Parodied: Bob hasn't remembered to shave this morning; somehow The Casanova he's trying to fool fails to notice.
- Zig Zagged: Bob got some coaching from Alice beforehand so he avoids some pitfalls, but wasn't entirely paying attention, and some areas weren't covered, so Bob makes goofs too.
- Averted:
- Bob has crossdressed before, and thus learned the ropes well enough to pass.
- Bob applies his observation of women in the past to his current situation.
- Enforced: Bob's in a Situation Comedy, and the director believes that men in dresses are inherently funny, so insists that Bob be as obviously male as possible in that outfit.
- Lampshaded: "How do women walk in these things?" "Practice".
- Invoked: Alice set up the Zany Scheme for the purpose of getting video footage of Bob's clumsy performance as a woman.
- Exploited: Bob and Alice are at the villain's PR ball. In order to cover up Bob's mistakes, Alice acts even more awkwardly than him on purpose, so that the villain thinks she is the man in disguise rather than Bob.
- Defied: Bob spends several days training and studying, possibly with a sympathetic coach, before attempting to pass as a woman in public.
- Discussed: "Okay, guys, we need someone to pass as Alice to the Lithuanian ambassador. Does anyone here know how to walk in heels?"
- Conversed: "This is the third time they've had Bob disguise himself as a woman on Generic Sitcom; you'd think he'd be better at passing by now".
- Deconstructed: The impersonation fails right out of the gate due to Bob's failure to prepare properly, putting an end to the Zany Scheme five minutes into the program.
- Reconstructed: There's enough variance within modern gender roles that minor gaffes might well be overlooked; most people would feel bad if they falsely accused someone of being "the wrong gender" and will thus give the benefit of the doubt for a while.
Back to Different for Girls— No! Not like THAT! They'll figure out you're a guy for sure!
