Project "Trope the Nations"/She's a Man in Japan

"Sometimes things get Lost in Translation, and occasionally this isn't so much lost as purposely altered. Sometimes the "thing" in question is a character's sex.

Reasons for this are generally narrowed to five:


 * To make the show more marketable to girls (especially to tomboys if they aren't likely to want to identify with The Chick) when the original show had The Smurfette Principle in play;
 * The Moral Guardians don't want a Creepy or Wholesome Crossdresser or gay character in the cast (this is the most popular reason behind this trope, particularly in the case of Sailor Moon).
 * Related to the above reason, the character looks too girly to pass for a male.
 * The producers made a mistake. Sometimes, the character looked, sounded, and acted androgynous enough that picking a gender was basically a coin toss (and depending on the language, even pronoun choice may not be enough), and the translation team called wrong. Of course, when the character was simply mistaken for the opposite sex, this can lead to continuity problems and may or may not be fixed.
 * The work is being translated into a language that uses the concept of grammatical gender for nouns, and the character's sex doesn't fit the grammatical gender of their name, so the translator changed their sex because he thought it would otherwise look unnatural. This usually applies only to animals, objects, and Anthropomorphic Personifications.

''Compare Affirmative Action Girl, Hide Your Lesbians, and Getting Crap Past the Radar. A subtrope of Gender Flip. May result in Viewer Gender Confusion, as well as They Changed It, Now It Sucks!.''

'Note that despite the title, this applies to changes in either direction, not just male to female. Which country they're coming from or going to doesn't matter either. The only possible inversion is if the writer gender-flips a character before the work is released.'"

Advertising

 * The Hamburger Helper mascot is female in Kanin, Dendi and Setagaya. Don't ask.

Western Animation

 * The Venitian French, Japanese, Polish and Estonian dubs of Supernoobs portray Tyler as female named Tae, despite him being male in the original English dub. This is most likely because the translator mistook him for a girl due to him not having very much masculine traits.
 * The Venitian Japanese dub of Grojband portrays Corey as a female (a very masculine female) named Kasumi, despite the existence of Carrie, his genderbent doppelgänger.
 * The Venitian Arabic dub of KaBlam! changed June into a male... for some reason.
 * In the Venitian Estonian dub of Adventure Time, BMO is given a distinctive male voice and always refers to himself using male pronouns.