Whenever I'm on TV Tropes nowadays, I'm always startled how different the paragraph description of the trope is compared to the examples given of a trope. It's never like how I was when I was a teenager, where the information just speeds through my brain and I take it as-is.
"Adaptational Gender Identity is when a character's gender alignment changes - cisgender to transgender, transgender to cisgender, either to nonbinary, etc. ... See also Gender Flip, where an adaptation changes a character's gender with no mention to their alignment, or She's a Man in Japan, where a translation of a work changes a character's gender."
Cool. So this is a trans-specific variant of Gender Flip. However, I see a few examples where characters of "ambiguous" genders seem to have been added in. I would suggest that this is a different trope, as ambiguous is secretive. It's Word of God's "I'm not telling you". Sometimes it's used to allow someone to make up their own decision on what the character is, as in Video Game/Undertale. Sometimes it's done as a joke because fans couldn't figure out what the author was trying to do, so the author went with it, as in Soul Eater. There are many other reasons for making a character's gender a secret, including trying to sneak in a nonbinary character.
I know sometimes enbys like to joke around that their gender is ambiguous or androgynous. Some people surely identify as either of those two, but especially the latter. I also know that enbys like to see representation where they can get it. Cis characters crossdressing (whether they like it or not), characters who look like the opposite sex (anime is full of 'em), and characters that look like a little of both so you don't know what they were intended to be and the pronouns aren't clarifying. These headcanons and jokes were done with the knowledge that they needed representation, and they couldn't find it anywhere else, so "screw you, I don't care about the character's ambiguity or cisness, I'm going to make them NB!"
...But that's headcanon. The canon is ambiguity. The canon is unsure. The canon is unknown.
In that way, changing a character whose gender is a secret or "whatever you want it to be" is not the same as cis changing to trans or nonbinary changing to cis or anything like that. Cis, trans, and the many nonbinary genders are all hard, identifiable genders. There are jokes about what they are, but they are solid "yes, I am this" and unsure "I think I'm this?" Ambiguity is the audience and sometimes other characters in the story going "wait, what are they? He? She?" "I dunno, pick something for them, you're never going to know."
Sorry for the rant, but I had a lot of words to say. I suggest keep the canonically gender-ambiguous characters from this trope and create a new one for when those characters have a gender chosen for them in an adaptation. Because it's really different.
Edited by Zhvair
Is Hange's gender really left unambiguous as female in the anime? I don't remember them being called a woman, or having used she/her pronous about them.
Edited by StMaksym