Discussion Main / GenderBender

Actually, change of sex and change of gender is the same thing. The original meaning of "gender" is "sex"- and this continues being a popular use.

No. No it isn't.

It's an incorrect use.

Here is the description in The Other Wiki: "Gender is the range of characteristics pertaining to, and differentiating between, masculinity and femininity. Depending on the context, these characteristics may include biological sex (i.e. the state of being male, female or intersex), sex-based social structures (including gender roles and other social roles), or gender identity.[1][2][3][4]" " Sexologist John Money introduced the terminological distinction between biological sex and gender as a role in 1955. Before his work, it was uncommon to use the word gender to refer to anything but grammatical categories.[1][2] However, Money's meaning of the word did not become widespread until the 1970s, when feminist theory embraced the concept of a distinction between biological sex and the social construct of gender. Today, the distinction is strictly followed in some contexts, especially the social sciences[5][6] and documents written by the World Health Organization (WHO).[4] However, in many other contexts, including some areas of social sciences, gender includes sex or replaces it.[1][2] Although this change in the meaning of gender can be traced to the 1980s, a small acceleration of the process in the scientific literature was observed in 1993 when the USA's Food and Drug Administration (FDA) started to use gender instead of sex.[7] In 2011, the FDA reversed its position and began using sex as the biological classification and gender as "a person's self representation as male or female, or how that person is responded to by social institutions based on the individual's gender presentation."[8] In non-human animal research, gender is also commonly used to refer to the physiology of the animals.[2]" "n the English literature, the trichotomy between biological sex, psychological gender, and social sex role first appeared in a feminist paper on transsexualism in 1978.[2][9] Some cultures have specific gender-related social roles that can be considered distinct from male and female, such as the hijra of India and Pakistan."

Here is the description in the wiktionary: "gender (plural genders)

(grammar) A division of nouns and pronouns (and sometimes of other parts of speech), such as masculine / feminine / neuter, or animate / inanimate. 1991, Greville G. Corbett, Gender (ISBN 052133845X), page 65:

In Algonquian languages, given the full morphology of a noun, one can predict whether it belongs to the animate or inanimate gender […]

(informal, sometimes proscribed) Biological sex: a division into which an organism is placed according to its reproductive functions or organs.

the trait is found in both genders

(informal, sometimes proscribed) Biological sex: the sum of the biological characteristics by which male and female and other organisms are distinguished.

The effect of the medication is dependent upon age, gender, and other factors.

Identification as male/masculine, female/feminine or something else, and association with a (social) role or set of behavioral and cultural traits, clothing, etc typically associated with one sex. (Compare gender role, gender identity.) 2007, Helen Boyd, She's Not the Man I Married: My Life with a Transgender Husband (ISBN 0786750545), page 93:

One wife I met at a conference was in a hurry for her husband to have the genital surgery because she worried about his gender and genitals not matching if he were in a car accident, […]

2010, Eve Shapiro, Gender Circuits: Bodies and Identities in a Technological Age (ISBN 113499950X):

Thomas Beatie, a transgendered man, announced in an April 2008 issue of the gay and lesbian news magazine, The Advocate, that he was pregnant. […] Moreover, he saw no conflict between his gender and his pregnancy.

2012, Elizabeth Reis, American Sexual Histories, page 5:

Intersex people too challenge the idea that physical sex, not merely gender, is binary – a person must be definitively either one sex or the other.

The sociocultural phenomenon of the division of people into various categories such as "male" and "female", with each having associated clothing, roles, stereotypes, etc. 1993, David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration, page 187:

The annals of colonial history offer relatively few such encounters between women, and it may be that gender has created here a marginal space in which something like an actual dialogue is possible between British and Sudanese.

2004, Wenona Mary Giles, Jennifer Hyndman, Sites of violence: gender and conflict zones, page 28:

Gender does not necessarily have primacy in this respect. Economic class and ethnic differentiation can also be important relational hierarchies, […] . But these other differentiations are always also gendered, and in turn they help construct what is a man or a woman in any given circumstance. So while gender is binary, its components have varied expressions.

2005, Colin Renfrew, Paul Bahn, Archaeology: The Key Concepts, page 131:

Even with some adamant processualists, however, gender has made inroads.

(obsolete) Class; kind. circa 1603, Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3:

...plant nettles or sow lettuce, set hyssop and weed up thyme, supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many...

Usage notes

Some speakers, particularly in informal contexts, use sex and gender synonymously (interchangeably). In formal contexts, a distinction is usually made between sex (which is biological) and gender (which is social). See Wikipedia's article on the sex/gender distinction for more."

I don't think we need to concern ourselves over an idiom that predates TV Tropes.com by decades. It's just a pre-existing term. The term "gender bender" means what it means, even if by today's popular vernacular you want to call it "sex bender". Are we going to argue about the word "bender" next? I mean, sex isn't really being "bent".

Make allowances for the fluidity of language. Definition-wise, "sex" and "gender" meant the same thing for centuries. It's comparatively recent that anyone redefined the term "gender" to be a "social construct", and VERY recent that the idea became popular and started showing up in dictionaries, wikis etc. The first serious proposal that the terms "gender" and "sex" be separated with "gender" being a social construct came from Judith Butler in 1991, and just because she proposed it didn't make it so. Some think the idea dates back to Dr. John Money back in 1965 when he experimented on the Reimer twins, but he made no proposals to change language. He just theorized that much of what makes our gender/sex is all in the mind.

Dunno, it's just the way the trope was named and defined back in the misty days of yore.

Unfortunately, a lot of the tropes in this area are used confusingly in the "outside world" and/or named confusingly on TV Tropes itself. As you note, Gender Bender is often used in the "real world" to describe anything from what we call it to "androgynous" looks. And Gender Flip means something very specific on TV Tropes, but elsewhere is often used as a synonym for what our Gender Bender trope describes.

And technically speaking, we really should be using "sex" instead of "gender" for most of these tropes....

But we're more or less stuck with what we've got.

bah, wrong discussion, ignore this.

The term "Gender Bender" for gender transformations wasn't invented here. I remember a computer game called "Rex Neublar and the Cosmic Gender Bender", and there's the X-Files episode "Gender Bender".

I went through the live TV examples and referenced specific episodes where appropriate. I've seen that episode, and this particular example is a stretch. At the same time nobody even mentioned Season 5's main villain Glory, who transformed into Ben regularly. (I added it.)

It sounds like it qualifies as Gender Bender to me.

NVM

As notable as fanfiction is on this site (not that I like it), a lot of fanfics feature some gender bending. To list them all would be impossible.

There's no particular reason for not having a Fan Fic section. If you have good examples to list, feel free to add them.

As with any example, it's best to elaborate a bit beyond "This Fan Fic has an example."

A fanfic section could start with “Examples are innumerable.”

This "problem" is actually addressed (though admittedly there's still a bit of "reading between the lines" required. It seems that Mikey's "curse" also makes her immune to magic. That's a major plot point in the storyline with the puppet guy - he tries to use magic on her, and it backfires, letting the good guys win.

Looks like Mikey's full backstory will be unresolved for a long time, unfortunately, as the big DC relaunch doesn't include Zatanna, and #13 was Dini's last issue.

Oh, and #13's "flashback dream sequence" is pretty explicit that she used to be a guy. The only other explanation would be that, for some reason, "dream logic" has her appearing as a guy, but that would be pretty random.

Even if it's not technically accurate it sounds like it's referring to the trope, so it's good to stay.

That being written, if you can find a better quote that both demonstrates the trope and is technically accurate, by all means replace it.

Like, in real life? Not without surgery, hormone therapy, and years of work. Even then, it's not a perfect change. That Other Wiki has more information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender

Now, in fiction? Of course.