Basic Trope: In fiction, once a guy becomes a girl, circumstances will conspire to keep her a girl.
- Straight: He becomes a she, and she isn't able to fix this fact permanently, no matter how hard she tries.
- Exaggerated: Every man genderbends, and they aren't able to fix this fact, no matter how hard they try. In fact it is the case of that one Codename: Kids Next Door where they don’t even remember being male.
- Downplayed:
- She wears masculine clothes to look as boyish as possible but is still physically female.
- She has a way to turn back to a man but only temporarily.
- Justified:
- The magic that powers the curse is very powerful, and will strike out at any attempt to cure it.
- "It's easier to build a hole than a pole."
- She's pregnant and the negative consequences of going through a Mister Seahorse situation are told to her so she decides to put reverting off until she's given birth.
- The gender-swapping magic only works once on any given person, so girls who turn into guys can't turn back either.
- The magic specifically only turns males into females, not vice-versa.
- The Applied Phlebotinum works by erasing the Y chromosome and duplicating the X, then rebuilding the body according to the new genetic code. Unfortunately, the Y-chromosome isn't "saved", so there's no way to restore the original DNA.
- The gender-swapping device theoretically could do both MTF and FTM changes, but it's a Black Box and nobody has any idea how to change the settings.
- She was female to begin with.
- Inverted: He becomes a she but only for a second.
- Gender Inverted: She becomes a he, and circumstances conspire to keep him this way permanently.
- Subverted:
- He turns into a she, and a few episodes later, fixes this problem.
- It turns out that the wizard that turned the boy into a girl could reverse it at any time.
- Double Subverted:
- He turns into a she, and a few episodes later, fixes this problem... But he liked being a she and changes back regularly.
- He turns into a she, and a few episodes later, fixes this problem... But the fix doesn't take, and he reverts back to she.
- ... but the wizard refuses to reverse the change.
- Parodied:
- "As you see, the metaphysical dynamics of the pan-universal structure induce a distorting pressure which creates cross-temporal alterations of events and structures to ensure that certain events can never be reversed."
- A Wizard cause Jim and Jill to switch genders. He readily switches Jill back from male to female, but refuses to switch Jim back from female to male.
- Zig Zagged:
- He becomes a she, and while there are cures, either a) the cures are temporary, or b) he ends up switching genders repeatedly, without requiring a good reason.
- A wizard turns a boy into a girl. It turns out that the wizard is able to reverse the change, but refuses to. An armed gang of male mates of the former boy confront the wizard, demanding that he reverse the change. He still refuses, and the gang shoots him. Unbeknownst to the gang, the wizard has transformed every firearm into an M 2 F gender-changing machine, so every gang boy turns into a girl.
- He/she changes genders genders constantly.
- Averted:
- He turns into a she, and it's clear from the start that it's only temporary.
- He turns back into a she.
- There is no gender-bending to begin with.
- Enforced: "We can't let her find a cure for her Gender Bender curse; the curse is part of the premise of the show."
- Lampshaded:
- "I'll bet you five dollars she fails at finding a cure again." "Nah, that's an unfair bet. Specify which way it fails and you're on."
- "It's been an hour and I still have boobs - I'm going to go buy some bras."
- Invoked:
- He likes being a she, and rejects (or, if necessary, sabotages) any attempts to cure it.
- He was genderbent at birth.
- Exploited: A con artist takes advantage of her desperation and sells her an expensive scam treatment.
- Defied:
- "I'm not stepping into the Gender Bending machine. I just know it'll break down immediately, and then I'll be stuck as a girl until it gets fixed, which could take months if I'm lucky, and could very well be permanent."
- "I still identify as a boy and I'm not about to let some machine say otherwise!
- Discussed: "He's a girl now, huh? Ten bucks says he never changes back."
- Conversed: "Why is it that any character who is turned into a girl for more than five minutes stays that way?"
- Deconstructed:
- The newgirl goes through severe bouts of depression as she slowly loses hope of ever returning to her old life. After a lot of soul searching, her friends reminding her that she's still herself inside, and not a small amount of therapy, the new girl comes to terms with her new lot in life.
- The ruins of a civilization were found where Gender-Bending magic which followed this law was used. It's revealed that the civilization fell after the gender ratio became skewed to the point where the remaining males simply couldn't keep the population levels up. Or, in case of male genre being the thriving one, civilization fell because the remaining females couldn't keep the population level up. The civilization continued using the magic even when it was clear that too few children were born to continue the practice.
- Desperate to turn back, the transformee undergoes transition.
- Feeling too humiliated to live as a female, she becomes a recluse.
- She was the saboteur of all the attempts. The truth is, she wanted to stay a she the whole time.
- Reconstructed: The new girl comes to terms with her new lot in life after a lot of soul searching, only to rededicate herself to finding a cure. In the meantime, she decides to live out her life as best she can.
- Played For Drama:
- His transformation to female rewrote his/her DNA so that instead of a Y chromosome, she had another copy of his preexisting X chromosone... With no Y chromosome left, transforming back into a man means somehow making one from her second X chromosome, and even if that was a success he wouldn't be the man he was before. He'll be even further from where he started. Disgusted and disappointed by the unrecognizable man in the mirror, he goes back to being a woman... It's as close to who she was as she can get.
- Alternatively, driven to despair by the fact that he will never be able to be himself ever again, he takes his own life.
- He has a recessive allele for some tragic genetic disease on his X chromosome, and now that he has two of them it manifests physically.
Back to First Law of Gender Bending
