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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, 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.
- Downplayed:
- She's still trying to find a way to turn back.
- Alternately, 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.
- Alternatively, as they say, "it's easier to build a hole than a pole."
- Alternatively, she's pregnant and the consequences of going through a Mister Seahorse situation are told to her (and they are not good), so she decides to put reverting off until she's actually given birth.
- Alternatively, the gender-swapping magic only works once on any given person, so girls who turn into guys can't turn back either.
- Alternatively, she was actually a she to begin with.
- Inverted:
- He becomes a she...but only for about a second.
- She becomes a he, and circumstances conspire to keep him this way.
- Subverted:
- He turns into a she, and a few episodes later, fixes this problem.
- She was a she to begin with.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- Desperate to turn back, the transformee undergoes transition.
- Feeling too humiliated to live as a female she becomes a recluse or kills herself
- She was the saboteur of all the attempts. The truth is, she wanted to stay a she the whole time.
- Reconstructed: The newgirl comes to terms with her new lot in life after a lot of soul searching, only to rededicate herself to finding a cure, somehow. In the meantime, she decides to live out her life as best she can.
- 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 necessarily requiring a good reason.
- 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, though."
- Invoked:
- He likes being a she, and rejects (or, if necessary, sabotages) any attempts to cure it.
- He was genderbent at birth.
- Second Law of Gender Bending
- 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."
- Discussed: "He's a girl now, huh? Ten bucks says he never changes back."
- Conversed: "Why is it that any character in an anime who is turned into a girl for more than five minutes stays that way?"
- Played For Drama:
- His transformation to female rewrote his DNA so that instead of a Y chromosome, he had another copy of his pre-existing X-chromosone... And with no Y chromosome left, transforming back into a man means somehow making one from his second X chromosome... And it won't make him 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 he was as he 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.
- Also, 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