Gender flip

Template:Short descriptionA gender flip or gender swap is a technique in fiction in which characters are portrayed as a different gender from the one in which they were originally written. It is commonly used in movie remakes or reboots.

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. The 2016 movie received significant backlash, with its trailer video becoming the most disliked in YouTube history. 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".

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.

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.

See also

Look up gender-flip in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• 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.