Gender flip

A gender flip or gender swap is a technique in fiction in which characters are portrayed as a different gender from the one as which they were originally written.^[1] It is commonly used in movie remakes or reboots.^[2]

According to The Guardian, one of the most high profile examples of this is the 2016 remake of the 1984 movie Ghostbusters, which featured a female ensemble instead of the original movie's male one.^[2] The 2016 movie received significant backlash, with its trailer video becoming the most disliked in YouTube history.^[3][4] David Sims wrote in The Atlantic that the subtext of much of the criticism of the movie was that "the idea of a female cast taking up the mantle of a very male film series is just somehow wrong",^[5] and the response has elsewhere been described as sexist and misogynistic.^[6][2] The website Vox described it as "a sequel to Gamergate".^[7]

In 2018, Amanda Hess wrote in the New York Times that in the two years since the Ghostbusters remake, this concept had progressed from being a "one-off stunt" into a genre of its own, citing Ocean's 8 as just one example of three such movies that summer alone.^[8] Other 2010s examples include Overboard, The Hustle, and Life of the Party.^[1]

Despite the prominence of the idea in movies of the 2010s, the concept dates from much earlier. Radio Times critic Emma Simmonds gives the example of 1939's His Girl Friday, adapted from 1928 Broadway play The Front Page, in which the gender of character Hildy Johnson is switched from male to female.^[9]

The gender swap technique is also used in media other than film. The 2024 concept album Warriors, based on a 1979 action film, took inspiration from Gamergate to reimagine the story’s central gang as women.^[10] Lin-Manuel Miranda has said the gender swap was central to him being able to write a compelling narrative for his adaption.^[10] The album's co-writer, Eisa Davis, characterized the flip as a revolutionary and a feminist act, given the movie's overtones she described as "misogynist, homophobic".^[11]

Emine Saner, writing in The Guardian, said that the phenomenon of gender-swap reboots seems like a positive, as it leads to more women in blockbuster movies, but may have downsides, such as being a safe place for studios to use female talent without taking a risk on original female-centric stories.^[2]

See also

• Rule 63, an Internet meme which states that "for every character there is a gender swapped version of that character".
• Cross-gender acting, when actors or actresses portray a character of the opposite sex.