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First Law of Gender-Bending

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"Once a girl has been created, circumstances will conspire to keep her a girl."

Not only are male-to-female Gender Benders a lot more common than their female-to-male counterparts, they are also a lot more permanent. One might think that the same Applied Phlebotinum that can change a male into a female should just as easily be able to do the opposite, but that's rarely the case in fiction— most characters who try to reverse a male-to-female Gender Bender will learn that Failure Is the Only Option.

There are many reasons for this. Even if the phlebotinum is ordinarily reversible there will be a Phlebotinum Breakdown or something else will prevent the character from simply switching the gender-bender into reverse. Perhaps he's become the only person who can protect the Earth with her gender-based superpowers. Perhaps she's fallen in love with his best friend after Jumping the Gender Barrier (the mind is a plaything of the hormones, after all). Maybe a Kid from the Future triggered her inner Mama Bear and she doesn't want to do anything that would prevent that child from being born (the possibility that he could have been the kid's father all along is almost never considered). Or maybe the Evilutionary Biologist responsible for overprinting half of his DNA simply forgot to make a backup copy of that pesky Y chromosome.


Regardless of its in-universe rationale, the First Law is usually enforced because Status Quo Is God: When the original sex change is a central tenet of the premise, then it will never be (permanently) reversed because the series simply wouldn't have happened without it. If the series has a finite length, such an event might be saved for its Grand Finale ... or not. On the other hand, if the sex change is not a central element of the series, it's probably just the plot of one-off episode and will be reversed quickly (perhaps to deliver a An Aesop about walking a mile in another "man's" shoes). If the work is a webcomic called The Amazing Girl-Boy's Adventures in Femininity, expect the First Law to be enforced. If one episode of a Kid Com called Homeroom Genie involves the Jackass Genie turning Zach into Zoe to teach him a lesson? Not so much.


Many applications of the first Law carry Unfortunate Implications by trading on the assumption that becoming a woman carries an inherent demotion, punishment, or loss of status. Even the most feminist Take That! against men may unconsciously support this Double Standard if it assumes that a Humiliation Conga is inevitable if you put a Handsome Lech in skirts. (In these cases expect the author to avert No Periods, Period in unfortunately graphic detail.) In contrast, female-to-male gender benders are not only less common, but are typically resolved quickly and easily, ultimately reinforcing the woman's original femininity because Women Are Wiser. And since Most Writers Are Male and Beauty Is Never Tarnished the very forces aiding the restoration of her gender will work against him restoring his because just that much more pulchritude to go around if she gets restored and he doesn't. And if the gender-bent man refuses to act in gender-appropriate ways, then who cares? Tomboys have always been more popular than sissies.

Before you ask, there is indeed a Second Law of Gender Bending, and even a Third Law of Gender Bending. They may or may not overlap with the First Law. See Man, I Feel Like a Woman for an example of why some (ex-)men may not want to change back.

This trope was originally named "Mandy's Law of Anime Gender Bending", after the person who first promulgated it and the source of her inspiration.


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    Anime & Manga 
  • Ranma ½ observes the law in more than one way:
    • Once Ranma acquires his gender-changing curse, no attempt at curing it works, at least not permanently. Further, many fans have observed that he seems to attract water (which triggers the change) as easily as fiancées and rivals. However, attempts by other characters at making Ranma permanently female also fail, so this may be less the Law than Status Quo Is God, a common trope in author Rumiko Takahashi's works.
      • The only verified, permanent cure for a Cursed Spring curse is to bathe in the water of your original form; so Shampoo would need to bathe in the water of Spring of Drowned Girl (which ironically gave Ranma his curse to begin with). Every other main cursed character would need to bathe in water from Spring of Drowned Man. However, Rule of Funny means that every time they NEARLY get it, they lose it somehow.
    • The "rules" of Ranma's curse are biased in favor of the Law. "Cold" water will turn Ranma into a girl, but pretty much any temperature below body temperature will suffice. Turning back into a boy requires genuinely hot water. Simply warm water won't do it, so she is usually limited to two options: taking a hot bath or obtaining a kettle of just-boiled water, which Akane seems to supply quite often. Also, the curse seems to make water obey the Rule of Funny and the Rule of Drama. Ranma will generally attract whichever temperature water is the most troublesome at the moment (and since Ranma was born male, this usually translates to cold water and this Law).
  • Megumi in Cheeky Angel has spent six years as a girl at the start of the series, dressing and grooming herself in a very feminine manner. The end of the anime implies (and end of the manga confirmed) that Megumi always was female and her "curse" was a purely mental Gender Bender that had convinced her she'd once been a boy.
  • Mizuho in Otome wa Boku ni Koishiteru not only gets to stay at the girls' school after being discovered, but volunteers to do so. Except for an obscured view of his face early on, we never get to see him in a 'male' persona. The manga shows his face in his 'male' persona, and he still IS cute.
  • Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl invokes this trope in chapter one, as the aliens who transformed Hazumu specifically stated that the transformation was irreversible when they returned her to her family. Fortunately for Hazumu, it's strongly implied that "he" was transgender all along without realizing it, and that may have been the reason behind the Gender Bender in the first place. With the first law promptly disposed of the series trips off to explore Jumping the Gender Barrier, Gender-Bender Friendship and If It's You, It's Okay, barely stopping to nod at Different for Girls along the way.
  • Inversion: Sailor Starlights from Sailor Moon. They spend significantly more screen time in male identities, to various degrees, with the handwaving that this makes their act of posing as pop idol singers looking for a lost love more convincing. Of course, the show is aimed at girls...
    • This is, however, only present in the anime; in the manga, they're just cross-dressing women and pretty much everyone knows it.
  • Exception: Makoto in El-Hazard: The Magnificent World gets to stop dressing up as Princess Fatora once the real princess returns.
  • Vampire Guilt-Na-Zan of Vampire Doll seems to be doomed to this fate, mainly because the person who transformed him is a Magnificent Bastard. Lampshaded in one of the omake comics:
    Kyoji: "Thus Guilt-Na obtained the treasure of "friendship", much more precious than becoming a man."
    Guilt-Na: "You're not going to change me back, are you?!"
    • Ultimately, the way the series deals with the First Law is aversion, at the end of the Manga.
  • Gacha Gacha Secret has a more understandable case, as the guy is turned into a girl whenever he sneezes, but never even tried to cure it; he just used his girl-form to make friends with the girl he likes to get to know her better. In the end however, it's played straight, as the people that were hired to change him back screwed up because he tried to leave half-way through the treatment so the girl wouldn't lose her friend. This ends up not curing him of the changing, but did cure the condition that would have killed him if he changed too much.
  • Inverted in Ouran High School Host Club: the club members conspire to conceal Haruhi's true gender as soon as it's revealed.
  • The fake Mashiro in the Mai-Otome manga coincidently takes the appearance of the young, flat-chested loli character. He's rarely out of drag, perhaps to placate fans with generous dissonance.
  • Played with in Happiness!, where Jun is turned into a girl. He's virtually identical looking anyway, and it only causes lots of magic-related difficulties before he decides to turn back. This might be a simple Shout-Out to the original game, where it was related to removing a Road Cone from more openminded fans.
  • Seen progressively in You're Under Arrest!. In the original season, Aoi is originally discovered to wear falsies and the animators make a point to be careful about what outfits they put her in. In later ones, Aoi wears virtually anything the standard girls can wear; we only get the fact dropped in the season premieres, and the requisite Once A Season episode starring him.
  • Played straight in Pretty Face. After regaining his original face Randou learns from the real Yuna that he'll need to continue posing as Rina's twin for another year, only to be told by Doctor Manabe that if he had another face-changing surgery he'd be stuck with a girl's face for the rest of his life. I Want My Beloved to Be Happy says he'll go along with it. Then the doc pulls off the mask Randou didn't even realize he was wearing, revealing that he actually still had Rina's face. It was a test set by Yuna to see if he was really worthy of Rina. The doctor couldn't bring himself to return Randou to his original appearance in the first place, and instead glued a mask of his original appearance to his face, and continually re-glued it while Randou was sleeping. So, in the long run he ends up spending more time with the eponymous pretty face. Though he now has the ability to glue the mask back onto his face if he wants to spend time as a guy again.
  • Space Pirate Mito: Poor Aoi. After losing the Power Limiter that was keeping him fully human in the final episode of the first series he learns that his gender has become unstable because his mother's species doesn't settle on a gender until puberty. Worse, his body is becoming disturbingly girlish just when his gender has to be stable in order to control the galaxy-saving Phlebotinum. Just as the credits begin to roll it's revealed that despite his best efforts to remain male his body had stabilized as female and she remains female from then on. Over the next series, the only hint of a chance to turn back is a mention by an Ax-Crazy goddess that she'd be male again upon submitting wholly to her (which, although Aoi says she'd prefer to turn back, doesn't present much of a dilemma).
  • Mashiro Ichijo of After School Nightmare was born male above the waist and female below. Mashiro starts out identifying as a male but struggles with his femininity. Towards the end of the series he accepts his femininity and chooses to be female. The series ends with the revelation that Mashiro's male and female "halves" were actually a pair of Half-Identical Twins struggling for survival in the womb; the female twin lives.
  • Averted in Shugo Chara!, mostly because Nagihiko is hiding from Amu that he and Nadeshiko are actually the same person.
  • In Birdy the Mighty, Tsutomu is accidentally killed and has to share Birdy's body, although it can change appearance between the two of them. The Decode remake takes it a step farther, when at the end of the first series he gets his own body back, it is destroyed almost immediately.
  • Kämpfer's Natsuru, after being turned into a girl to take part in a secret tournament of female-only fighters. He is the only character actually afflicted with a gender change, while the others merely transform into violent alter-egos. The change is triggered in the presence of other fighters, and also at will (once mastered), but Natsuru is very very often forced to maintain his female persona.
  • Played straight on Vandread with Nirvana sub-commander BC, aka Tenmei Uragasumi, Commander of the Taraak Intelligence. After he is forced to reveal "her" true identity to save Nirvana, he does not automatically revert to a male body—since their gender-bending is surgical (among other things)—and before he can have the reverse-surgery, he has a Becoming the Mask realization and decides to stay with the crew. They are allowed back in by The Captain under condition that she fully becomes a she once again—with which she is only too happy to oblige.
  • Discussed and explained in No Game No Life's light novel. Sora realizes that the Elves' gender changing magic pretty much substitues the Y chromosone with a clone of the X chromosone, so changing back is impossible since the Y chromosone no longer exists.
  • In The Vision of Escaflowne, Dilandau started off as a girl (actually Allen Schezar's long-lost younger sister), and was kidnapped and turned into a boy through a series of horrific Magitek experiments by the Zaibach Empire. Later, he turns back into a girl...and it's implied that she stays that way.
    • This only applies in the anime version; in the OVA the character was male from the start, and in the manga, the character started out as a female and stayed that way the whole time.
  • Boku Girl tends to tip the scales in favor of Mizuki's female form, with him spending more time and seemingly getting more fulfilment than he did as a male. He ultimately decides to stick with the change by the end, as per usual. Loki does give Mizuki the option to change back if she ever loves the opposite gender to her body, but since she's in love with Takeru now, the scales are still tipped Female.

    Comic Books 
  • In Knights of the Dinner Table, the gaming group is forced by their female fellow player-turned-DM to play as characters opposite their normal gender, causing a great gnashing of teeth by the conservatively oriented, hack-and-slash males of the group. When they finally begin playing, most of the players begin "rolling johns" and otherwise using their new gender as a tool for their usual larceny. However, Bob starts to have a deep affection for his character, to the point of preening his character figure. When the group comes across an artifact that would allow gender reversal, everyone leaps on the chance to have their characters switched to males, except for Bob, who states that he would like to have his character remain female. Within a few panels Sarah kills the character off and later admits to the rest of the gang she did it only because he was starting to creep even her out.
  • Mantra, the title character of the Malibu Ultraverse comic, was warrior knight Lukasz, reincarnated in the body of a woman for the first time after centuries of reincarnating into male bodies.
  • Marvel Comics' shapeshifter character Courier took on a female form during a time travel adventure with Gambit, as part of a ruse to investigate Mister Sinister (then acting as an obstetrician.) Sinister learned that his patient was a shapeshifter, and managed to extract that ability for his own use. Sinister (not knowing Courier's true sex) inadvertently left Courier permanently female as a side effect of this process.
  • Mister Sinister himself became subject to the First Law later. After trying to bodyswap with Professor Xavier unsuccessfully, the only available body was a female clone of himself. "Miss" Sinister has since had a fling with Wolverine's son Daken, and is disturbingly attractive considering her origin. However, this character doesn't share Mister Sinister's memories, so it's debatable whether she is "really" him.
  • Alpha Flight demonstrates that while The First Law is powerful, it can't withstand the power of Status Quo Is God. Near the end of John Byrne's run, the body of Walter Langkowski (aka Sasquatch) was destroyed. Under new writer Bill Mantlo, his spirit eventually ended up merging with the body of the shapeshifter Snowbird, who died while in the form of a white-furred Sasquatch. Walter soon discovered that Sasquatch's new "human" form was, like Snowbird, female, and she lived for several years as Wanda Langkowski. Wanda's sex change was only one of several major changes to the Byrne-era status quo, most of which were reverted when he was off the book, and Sasquatch regained both his manhood and his original orange fur.
  • Shade, the Changing Man had to take over the body of a drowning woman in order to stay alive himself. Overnight, it reverted to female form and could not be changed back until he found the person responsible for the woman's death. Even after solving that mystery, his female features would re-emerge from time to time until he abandoned the body to fight death on its own terrain.
  • Played straight for a while with Arcee in The Transformers: Robots in Disguise. Originally the male-coded victim of a forceful, traumatic sex change, it's made abundantly clear how thoroughly life ruining this was, yet the possibility of reversing the procedure never comes up. It's soft retconned near the end of the series' run and hard retconned in the final issue into a consensual sex change.

    Fan Works 
  • This is initially averted in Diaries of a Madman, with Nav being able to freely switch genders thanks to his artifact. Later on they break, resulting in him being trapped as a female. It doesn't go down well.
  • In Happy Daze, Fonzie from Happy Days becomes a woman named "Francie" because of Mork from Ork. She stays as Francie.
  • In When a Pony Calls, Soren the male, human protagonist, starts off getting body swapped with Lyra, a female unicorn, then through an accident on Lyra's part, his human body gets gender bent, and then he realizes Equestria's natural magical energy isn't reacting well with his human body, causing it to morph into a pony body instead. While the body swapping is thankfully undone at the end, the gender bending and species change is not, even the sequel, The Alchemists Heart, where our formerly human protagonist Soren, now pegasus Silver Script does discover a way to reliably change a pony's gender she doesn't change back. Though this is justified in that at this point, Soren's /Silver's old life on Earth has been completely ruined with no way to repair it, so instead she decides to just accept her new life in Equestria as a female pony.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Goodbye Charlie: A male chauvinist lady killer is killed by his latest conquest's husband, and returns as Debbie Reynolds.
  • Switch (1991): A male chauvinist lady killer is killed by his ex-lovers and returns as Ellen Barkin.
  • In The Skin I Live In, a would-be rapist is captured by the father of one of his victims (who happens to be a plastic surgeon) and turned into a woman as revenge.

  • In Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Orlando transforms into a woman and stays a woman.
  • In Mercedes Lackey's Vows and Honor series, the sorceress Kethry puts a rapist under a visual (and tactile) illusion of a woman's body and sends him back to his rapist buddies. Later, a demon puts an end to this illusion — by changing him into a real woman.
  • Jack Chalker (of course).
    • He lampshaded this trope even before it was a trope in Downtiming The Night Side. Once the timestream finds a niche for a nightsider, they become that sort of person in whatever time they leap to. (In the hero's case, a prostitute.)
    • The River of Dancing Gods series has the hero temporarily genderbent a few times as a result of various magical shenanigans, but at the climax of Songs of the Dancing Gods he winds up permanently stuck in a female body after his own body is destroyed in a Heroic Sacrifice.
    • In The Identity Matrix, various characters end up wearing each other's bodies. The narrator, a man, finds himself first occupying the body of an Amerindian girl, then occupying the body of a Canadian college student. Since the authorities can't return him to his original body they decide to rewrite his memory to turn him into a stripper and a prostitute. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • David Weber takes this on in his Safehold series, where the primary protagonist is a robotic duplicate of a young female space-navy officer. When she has to deal with the primitive, male-dominated society that dominates the remains of the human race when she wakes up, she uses the robotic body's nanotech capabilities to turn herself male. And has so far stayed that way through 5 full books. (An amusing moment lampshades the usual Gender Bender trope when she finds herself with a disturbingly physical reaction to what the originally straight, female character sees as several attractive young men... while skinny-dipping...)
  • In the Wheel of Time series, the Dark One intentionally gives the formerly male Balthamel a beautiful female body as Aran'gar. Getting a body for reincarnation is difficult in the Randland universe, so Aran'gar's choices were either to remain stuck with a woman's body, or die. Again. Being a Depraved Bisexual, Balthamal / Aran'gar was more startled than upset by her change.
  • In Robert A. Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, the rich old cotter protagonist pays to have his brain implanted into a fresh young body in order to cheat death. The first matching donor to come up is a woman. When he comes to after the surgery, he thinks about this a bit and decides it's worth it to see how the other half lives. Seeing as how his surviving the first transplant was a miracle, his situation is pretty permanent.
  • Invoked and Played for Drama in Judith Tarr's A Fall of Princes: The two male characters are more than half in love already, the best solution for solving the conflict between their nations is a Perfectly Arranged Marriage, same-sex marriage is not an option, and the required magic ritual is explicitly irreversible. Hello, Sevayin.
  • Played straight and justified with a female-to-male Gender Bender in S.L. Viehl's Dream Called Time: While Duncan seemed to be more-or-less okay with the idea of the Gay Option, Cherijo did not want to look like her utterly horrible father, and switched back to female as soon as an opportunity arose.
  • K. Lynn's His Womanly Ways employs the body-horror route with a gradual genderswap for the main character. Womanizer gets cursed to know what it's like for a woman, and he slowly starts turning into one. The change is found to be permanent, but the novel subverts the typical genderswap tropes by utilizing an underlying transgender theme.
  • In the novel Girl by David Thomas, Bradley Barker (the main character) goes into hospital to have his wisdom teeth removed and is given a sex-change operation by mistake. Change is permanent and the main character does get used to being a woman through typical dress and actions, but the novel is surprisingly respectful of the transgender topic despite the comedic plot set-up.
  • In Princess Holy Aura, after Steve makes the choice to become Holly, he consciously makes the choice to live his daily life as a girl over the months of summer vacation, so he will be fully acclimated by the time the school year comes around and he has to spend time around and among other people.
    • At the end of the story, when Holly sacrifices herself to kill Azathoth and is subsequently brought back, she discovers she has lost the ability to change back into Steve at all.

    Live-Action TV 
  • This is the premise behind the toku series Seishoujo Senshi Saint Valkyrie, as well as the webcomic that it appears to copy, Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki. (See this SGVY blog post for a discussion and video.)
  • La Lola is a telenovela that originated in Argentina, and has been adapted in many other markets. Most of them deal with this trope:
    • In the Argentinian and Spanish versions, Lalo tracks down the witch who turned him into a woman, and she agrees to turn him back (after laughing for a while). They hold hands, she starts her mystic chanting... and promptly falls backward, dead.
    • The Chilean version gets way more convoluted, as both Lalo/Lola and Pepa/Pepe can't get back to normal and when that happens it's just for a few episodes. In later episodes, there are two Lalos or Pepas thanks to the later-added conditions to the spell.
  • In the Wingin It episode "I, Carlie", Angel-in-Training (AIT) Denise agrees that Carl, now Carlie, has learned her lesson, and agrees to turn her back into Carl, but finds she can't. The AIT handbook explains that he cannot go back to being a boy until he truly understands girls.
  • Goodbye Charlie, a sitcom adaptation of the movie of the same name (which was itself based on a play) starring Suzanne Somers as 'Charlie'.
  • Subverted in Degrassi when Adam, a transgender man already living as a male when introduced, detransitions once before reverting to his male persona within the episode and burning his last remaining girl clothes.
  • Averted in Wizards of Waverly Place: Max spends a few episodes as Maxine, but returns to normal eventually.
  • Reversed in an episode of Two and a Half Men. Charlie goes to the bar to meet up with an old girlfriend whom he hasn't seen in years. The individual is played by Chris O'Donnell, who then begins a sexual relationship with Charlie's mom.

    Myths & Religion 
  • Averted by Tiresias, the blind seer of Greek myth, who was turned into a female, and then several years later was turned back into a man.

  • The movie and television versions of Goodbye Charlie were both based on the 1959-1960 play of the same name. With Lauren Bacall as Charlie.

    Tabletop Games 
  • In the adventure Tomb of Horrors, there is a hallway filled with mist that reverses gender and alignment when you pass through. If you try to step back through it to reverse the effect, your alignment is changed back to normal, but not your gender, and you take minor damage. Passing through a third time will change your gender back to normal, and also teleports you outside the dungeon — without your clothes or equipment.

    Video Games 
  • Both played straight and inverted in the Dating Sim Kuru Kuru Coeur, in which the three originally female love interests all become male at some point, two staying that way half the game, and all four datable characters have one ending for each gender with the main character changing to match. On the other hand, the originally male main character and his (dateable!) best friend spend 90% of the game as girls and have disturbingly large male fan clubs to boot.
  • In Fable II, there is only one gender reassignment potion in the entire world, and it's permanent and irreversible.
  • Baldur's Gate 2 has a few examples:
    • Smug Snake Edwin Odesserion ends up as a woman after using a scroll he thought would turn him into a lich. While he does manage to turn back in a guy later in the game, in the epilogue an encounter with Elminster turned him back into "Edwina", who's now a barmaid (later ending up in Ferelden somehow) and a "bitter, bitter woman".note 
    • A permanent sex change is also one of the possible results of a Wild Mage's spell failure. While it's possible to reverse the process with another spell failure, given that the game rolls percentage to determine the effects of wild magic, the odds are fairly slim.
  • Averted in MUDs, where one of the standard status effects is a Gender Bender (which really doesn't do anything in-game except change your pronoun), which affects both genders equally and wears off in a few minutes.
  • Played with in Disgaea Dimension 2 with Laharl;
    • In episode 4, he gets turned into a woman, but it's explicitly said to be temporary and he regains his manhood after the episode. ... Unless you lose to Hoggmeiser during the fourth stage, which results in the episode's Bad Ending where Laharl is forced to become an idol; he only agreed to the deal because he fully expects to turn back into a guy soon anyway and thus null the contract, but he winds up remaining a girl for longer than expected... Probably forever.
    • Later on in the Postgame, one can pass a bill in the Dark Assembly to change Laharl back into a woman. Having done so, the bill to change him back into a guy is far more expensive to suggest and is met with near universal opposition... Though this is probably justified because the bill to turn Laharl female again is essentially called "I want to be popular again!", implying Laharl is way more liked as a woman.

    Web Comics 
  • In Misfile, not only does Ash seem to have a better life as a girl, nearly everyone he and the angels have come in contact with since the misfile seem to have had their lives improved in some way. Which hasn't stopped him from wanting his male body back, but as things stand, it's going to be a looooong time before that happens.
  • Sailor Sun. Despite Transformation Rays being mundane (albeit prohibitively expensive), the Kid from the Future has a tendency to call the main character "Mom," suggesting that she never changes back. The author has theorized that these tropes appeal to people due to the humbling effect inherent in a male-to-female transformation in our male dominated society.
  • The Wotch: how much Anne loves to turn her male friends into girls is lampshaded frequently but the tendency seems to extend to everyone with the appropriate powers. Over the course of the strip many, many characters get their gender bent but it's only the formerly male ones who fail to get restored. (Even the straw feminists of D.O.L.L.Y., who arguably earned karmic punishment, get turned back into girls in the end.) The strip seems to delight in finding reasons why former men can't or shouldn't be turned back, even though given Anne's powers and general benevolence it ought to be easy. There's even a spin-off (The Wotch: Cheer!) comic about four of its permanently genderbent characters.
    • Also, in the years before the DOLLY arc, though, as stated, male-to-female changes were constant and many were permanent, female-to-male changes never happened except for an oft-bodyswapped couple. One time we thought Anne and Miranda had become boys, but it turns out Wotches cannot be male and so Anne and Miranda are immune to genderbending.
    • Lord Sykos shows up and goes on a gender-changing spree across town, happily encouraged by his first victim "Aimee". At the end of the story arc he turns all his victims back to normal except Aimee who decides she prefers being Sykos' Perky Female Minion to her former existence. As we don't get to see much of "his" life before the transformation we're given no real motivation for this decision.
      Aimee: "Seriously, Anne, don't ruin this for me."
    • There was also one unnamed "maiden" whom Lord Sykos sent to get tacos who had the misfortune of failing to return before Lord Sykos restored everyone else and returned to his home dimension, leaving her with no memory of the incident, and a lot of unanswered questions.
      Where am I? Why do I have tacos? ...and why am I a girl?
  • El Goonish Shive, while not as casual or frequent about it as The Wotch, certainly pays the Law its dues. According to the rules governing the comic's main sex-changing phlebotinum, only male-to-female sex changes can be made permanent (via pregnancy); female-to-male sex changes, even of someone trapped by pregnancy (for whom it's only even possible afterwards), cannot exceed a 30 day time limit.
    • The second time a boy — the main character — is turned into a girl the device breaks, leaving "her" stuck for the full thirty days, and the attempt to get around this leaves him with an Opposite-Sex Clone and the permanent ability to change sex at will, something the rules of magic eventually force him to do on a regular basis.
    • Also, much later, a "seyunolu" (chimera) member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad, Vlad, is hit with a Transformation Ray and is turned female, but more importantly to him/her, human. "She" has no desire to change back, and since Bizarre Alien Biology overrides the time limit (and, implicitly, gender identity), Vladia, as she is now called, is treated as a woman from then on.
    • Moving on from Elliot being a double victim of this, we get to Tedd. Who probably wouldn't know this was a law: the 'circumstances' usually equate to "Dad's out of town" and "As a girl, I'm hot".
      • And moving even on FARTHER, the "Squirrel Prophet" storyline has Tedd experience his first involuntary gender change, when his great godmother decides to try doing him a favour, with unexpected results.
      • Eventually Tedd even gains the unique ability to alter his "base" form, and thus can decide to stay permanent as either gender.
      • And just to twist this trope even further, when Tedd is forced to decide which gender he'd rather be if he had to pick one, he settles on male.
  • Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki. (See also Seishoujo Senshi Saint Valkyrie, above.) goes the gender-based superpowers route.
  • Abstract Gender: The guy who has no problems gender changing can change back and forth at will, the guy who hates it is stuck permanently.
  • Triquetra Cats started the comic this way, but soon delegated it into a minor plot point in favour of a more complex storyline — a new reader not starting at the beginning might take some time to realize they were ever boys. Though to be fair, technically the three main characters were girls to begin with. They were turned into boys as children by the secret organization their mother had worked for to hide their true identities. When said organization found them again several years later, they were restored to their original gender.
  • In Discordia, it's established that anyone transformed by a virgin winds up the virgin's gender; this is true whether they started out that way or not (for instance, a man neutralized via Fountain of Youth ends up as a little girl). Since the only character with such powers is a prepubescent girl, the male cast members had better watch their step. Furthermore, the formerly male main character can't be transformed again at all.
  • The Order of the Stick introduces The Belt of Gender Bendingnote , which once put on, can't normally be taken off. It requires a Remove Curse spell to get rid of it. And of course, Roy is the only main character to ever wear it. It's a fairly mild example, though, since Roy's best friend is a Cleric who manages to remove it soon enough. The trope is lampshaded when Durkon asks whether Roy is sure he wants to change back, and Roy irritably tells him he's been perfectly comfortable with being a man all his life — why wouldn't he want to stay one?
  • Narbonic examples:
    • Averted in a gender storyline, where Helen spends a full week of strips male before Dave is turned into a woman, and they switch back simultaneously.
    • But once that can of worms was opened, they never could close it again. Dave may not remain a woman permanently, but they transform on many occasions, particularly after Helen and Dave fall in love and start having sex a lot. Now think about that for a moment. It is treated less as a plot point and more as a "thing mad scientists do", along with drugging the coffee and breeding super-gerbils. Also, Dave gives birth to their child. He's even aware beforehand that it's how things will likely come to pass, given that Helen's a mad scientist.
  • Jayden And Crusader referenced, and subverted, this trope twice, and eventually did swap the gender of its most masculine character. However, that was reversed moments afterwards thanks to his excedingly violent nature. As the entire event was designed for the purpose of gaining readers the trope has only ever been jokingly entertained.
  • The Dragon Doctors opens with the eponymous doctors, three men and a woman, encountering a curse that irreversibly turns men into women; the male doctors fall victim, and in stopping the spread the female one is similarly irreversibly turned into a man. All four are ultimately cured, but while the woman goes back to being a woman, the other three each come up with a different reason to stay a woman. Even a nurse who opts to stay male soon falls prey to a magical accident that makes it unsafe for her to do so. It's important to note also that the cure isn't generally available, so countless others are still stuck.
  • In DDG Netta seems to enjoy keeping Zip a girl far too much to let him ever change back.
  • In MSF High and High School Changed Me:
    • Nurse Keiri seems to have made it her mission to warp the gender ratio as much as possible. Everyone who gets more than bandages from her leaves female. At the end of the day, anyone who's been transformed in any way can change back totally or keep all aspects of the new form, forever; with this in mind, she also tends to give incentives not to change back. There's nothing to stop people who have been changed from being changed again, but (other than the daily Reset Button) female-to-male is rare, with no known permanent instances in either comic, in which so far at least three significant male characters (Urk and Victor/ia in MSF, Colin/Colette in HSCM) have become female for good.
    • Also, the Legion are a fairly benign version of The Virus; the victims, who seem to have been mostly male, keep most of their personality, but become unquestioningly loyal literal Green Skinned Space Babes. In the main setting, this is as temporary as anything else (although like Keiri, they put some effort into retention), but in most of the galaxy, it's irreversible. (Note that Legion T Fs are only irreversible outside of MSF High because of the lack of transformation magic in Mahou Galaxy. Tends to be all over the place in the Forum RP, as well.)
  • In the first comic of I Dream of a Jeanie Bottle, the main character Jean is turned into a female genie that looks very similar to Barbara Eden from the TV show. While Jean (aka Jeanie) attempts to understand her new powers, she has yet to find a way to turn herself back into a male, and her mentor has told her it's either impossible or forbidden (a typo making it ambiguous) to do more than disguise herself as a man. She also, possibly as a form of quietly ironic revenge, has a habit of doing the same to men and boys around her, with some apathy to their restoration - three men and a teen boy are now two woman, a little girl, and a teen girl respectively, and unlikely to encounter her again. Her "master" Neil is also being forced by circumstances to spend significant stretches female.
  • In Exiern, the main character is a barbarian warrior who is turned into a woman by a misfired magic spell. All his attempts to get turned back to his original gender fail or backfire. At one point, the clerics who were attempting to undo the spell end up turned into women themselves. Surprisingly, the latter part turns into an aversion of the trope. The clerics perform a reversal spell, and it works... for all of them except the one who obviously loved being a girl, and she obviously refused to reverse her own gender. Though one of the clerics that became male again, turned female again after sneezing, probably implying that their return to manhood is short-lived. Later, when Tiffany consults of consulting a magic encyclopaedia about a cure, the result is just three pages of mocking laughter, in text.
  • In the Jet Dream remix comics, the biological weapon Virus-X changes the T-Birds of Thunderbird Squadron into the T-Girls of J.E.T. D.R.E.A.M. The T-Girls are able to de-feminize the male population of Miami Beach after a terrorist attack, but the antidote is ineffective after 24 hours, and thus cannot help them personally. Only one person is shown to believe Virus-X to be potentially reversible, and she's an insane Psycho Ex-Girlfriend. A voluntary treatment based in some unspecified way on Virus-X is also portrayed as irreversible.
  • In the photographic novel, Little Worlds, the part of Lev (a male character) is played by a female actor, leading to questions about Lev's gender identity.
  • When Blair runs amok with the Tiresias Orb in Eerie Cuties, the only major male character affected is outside getting an unconscious boy some fresh air when the orb is destroyed, unleashing a World-Healing Wave on everyone inside the school, and he remains a girl for several chapters, with no suggestion of how it might be undone until it actually happens (leading to another important boy being transformed, albeit with much less of a sense of permanence).
  • In Ballerina Mafia, a character's friends give him an Easy Sex Change in his sleep as an April Fool's day prank. He decides to just start living life as a girl now, and was more annoyed than anything by it at first; ultimately, when she's given the chance to change back with no strings attached, she declines. Later, when Joel screws up the timestream the powers that be have to make BM an alternate timeline from Concession, and one of the differences is that BM Joel is actually Julia.
  • In The Bend Loro swaps genders somewhat randomly. As a girl, she's a great inventor. As a boy, he's lazy and pretty useless.

    Web Original 
  • The Whateley Universe:.
    • If someone is turned into a girl by the Exemplar power, and used to be a guy, no force on Earth can fix it, and such attempts have never been successful. Possibly literally so, as there's a goddess involved. Maybe. It has been hinted that the scientists that came up with this theory — that there's a force of evolution forcing mutants to out-breed humanity — may or may not have been wrong. On the flipside, the few characters turned into guys also have trouble fixing it, or don't try. It's just about standard to say that it's easier to cause a transformation than fix it. (See The Big Idea, A Single Fold, and all of the stories with Exemplar protagonists.)
    • Subverted in the character of Jade. She has trouble finding a way to transform herself in the first place! And once she does, failure is the only option... until she resorts to 'traditional' means. Professional surgery that works!
    • Even appears to be occurring to Phase, who is resisting with all his might the other two. However, it's not certain that it will end up like this, as Phase is still looking through 'outs'.
    • Subverted in "Ayla and the Mad Scientist": Belphegor gets transformed, and it only lasts long enough for him to dash into the girls' showers to ogle hot babes, whereupon he is restored to his old self... and gets in massive trouble with a bathroom full of superpowered women.
    • There are a number of aversions as well, with some involving people temporarily changed by Mad Science or Functional Magic, or SexShifters who can (voluntarily or involuntarily) shift back and forth. One character, Roulette, had been transformed by her mother when she was nine, then changed back, but later manifested as a female Exemplar; this time the change was permanent.
  • Two of the first main characters on The Trading Post were hit with this with different results. Not long after becoming Ashlyn, Jake realized she would not be getting her original body back. Arthur/Liz, on the other hand, thought she was, only to transform into Penelope instead. There have been a couple notable aversions, including Todd and Bryan.
  • In the Paradise setting, humans are randomly, permanently changed into Funny Animals (with some experiencing a gender-change at the same time). Except for the very few who experience additional changes once per year (and thus have a chance to change genders again), these changes are permanent.
  • Very common on Literotica when a sex change is involved.
  • Expect the vast majority of stories on sites specializing in Gender Bender and/or Crossdresser stories (e.g. Fictionmania, Crystal's Story Site, and Bigcloset TopShelf) to follow this trope.
  • Spells R Us stories typically involve the purchase of items that change a person's sex from the shop's wizard proprietor. Invariably, the change ends up being a permanent one, because SRU is The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday.
  • In Magical Girl Policy, Rob is not only told that he is destined to be a magical fighting cheerleader, but once he powers up for the first time, he will be stuck as a girl.
  • AFK: We see three apparent male-to-female gender switches in the show against one female-to-male, and the only attempt at changing it back fails because of a neglectful wizard.

    Western Animation 
  • Subverted in the French short film Geraldine (NSFW for cartoon boobies). The main character is a man who turns into a woman. It seems like it's going to stay that way, and as soon as he figures out how to live as a woman, he turns back into a man.
  • Subverted in Futurama in the episode "Neutopia". At the very end, Scruffy appears to be irreversibly trapped as a woman, but in the next episode he is back to normal. Earlier though, when the group asked the alien who reversed their genders to fix things, he's ready to go along with it... except Zapp Brannigan chooses that moment to leap in and melt the alien into a puddle, trapping everyone in their swapped genders until the alien's friend comes at the end of the episode to make things right.
  • In South Park. In the first episode of season 9, Mr. Garrison had a sex change to become a woman, then felt regret and wanted to go back, but his balls had already been used in Kyle's surgery to become tall and black, and were destroyed when Kyle tried to play basketball in his new body. It took three whole seasons before the now-Ms. Garrison was able to get another sex change to become a man again.

    Real Life 
  • Male-to-female sex reassignment surgery is easier to perform, and more closely matches the target sex, than female-to-male sex reassignment surgery. From a tissue-manipulation perspective, it's simply easier to make a convincing vagina out of a penis than the other way around. Inverted by by the hormonal side of gender reassignment. While male-to-female hormone replacement results in a softening of the skin, the development of breasts, and sometimes a change in emotional outlook, most of these can be reversed with female-to-male hormones (well, except for the breasts. They usually require surgery to remove). Female-to-male hormonal replacement, on the other hand, includes many permanent changes such as beard growth, baldness, development of the adam's apple and deepened voice; similar to the permanent changes a male experiences in puberty. Male-to-female hormonal replacement cannot reverse any of the aforementioned effects.
  • Subverted when it comes to sequential hermaprhoditism. While Protandry (male changing to female) is permanent, Protogyny (female changing to male) is also permanent.

Alternative Title(s): Mandys Law Of Anime Gender Bending, Girls Stay Girls, Once A Girl Always A Girl, Genderbending Trends Female, Law Of Conservation Of Femininity


Example of: