Neil Gaiman had a short story whose name I can’t remember it, but in it a geneticist cures cancer by creating an injection that rewrites the genetic code, but in so doing it also changes your gender. It becomes a recreational drug- “Do I want to be a girl this weekend or…nah, I’ll be a guy.”
Does anybody know the name of the story?
Yeah – I didn’t realize until I walked away that I was thinking of Robert Forward’s Camelot 30K. I haven’t read the comic series – although now I’ve got a lot of the run in my basement.
No reincarnation in 30K.
Sorry 'bout that.
Wasn’t there a recurring MTF transexual on Ally McBeal?
Well, then…you probably aren’t misremembering, then. >_>
I just thought of a few more examples: In the Harry Potter books, there are at least two known cases of folks using Polyjuice Potion to change gender. In book 4, we’re told of Mrs. Crouch and her son changing places to spring Junior from Azkaban, and in book 6, Crabbe and Goyle, Draco’s henchmen, turn into girls as a disguise.
On Star Trek: Deep Space 9, there’s a race of aliens called the Trill, consisting of a symbiotic union of a brainy wormlike thing (whose reproduction is never, as far as I know, detailed) with a humanlike host. The worm outlives the humanoid bodies, and can move from one to another, resulting in a personality that’s a fusion of the worm-thing with the humanoid. One of the major characters is Dax, who in current incarnation (Jadzia Dax and later Erza Dax) is female, but was earlier (Kirzan Dax) male.
This is a bit obscure, but “Dark Shadows” changed the gender for Dr. Hoffman before ‘she’ hit the screen. Initially, Dr. julian Hoffman was going to be the ‘Van Helsing’ character who would become the arch-nemesis of the vampire Barnabas Collins (who was fast becoming the show’s most prominent character). When the initial script for the episode introducing the character was typed up, the typist inadvertantly changed the name ‘Julian’ to ‘Julia’. The producer then thought “Well, why not make Dr. Hoffman a woman?” But in previous episdodes, Dr. Hoffman had been referred to as a ‘he.’ So, technically, Dr. Hoffman did change sexes, if before she even debuted.
More can be found at this site. That is, it could if I remember the URL correctly. It keeps track of all kinds of transformation themes in fiction, movies, comics, and other media separated by type (eg werewolves, magical youthening, etc).
In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Bartemius Crouch (the Younger) and his mother use Polyjuice Potion to switch identities and facilitate his rescue from Azkaban.
In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Draco Malfoy has Crabbe and Goyle use Polyjuice Potion to disguise themselves as first- and second-year girls while they are standing watch outside the Room of Requirement.
Larry Niven’s collection of short stories about Gil “the ARM” has one of the suspects for a murder being a MTF transexual.
Return to Oz, Ozma is hidden as a boy by Mombi until Dorothy breaks her out. They did not address this in the movie, BTW.
Bender from Futurama underwent a sex oil change so he wouldn’t be found out after he won bending medals at the Olympics.
In issues 12-14 of the late, lamented DC Comics series H-E-R-O, a construction worker named Joe got turned into the female heroine Electra-Girl by the H-Dial.
A small (but growing) independent comic company called Shooting Star Comics publishes the adventures of Fishnet Angel, a man who has become trapped in the body of a goddess…and become pregnant, to boot!
What no mention of the protagonist from Middlesex? Great book, BTW. I had an attending who was a Greek MD endocrinologist who specialized in gender issues… I got some points from her for mentioning how much I loved that book.
In Joyce Carol Oates’s Victorian novel, A Bloodsmoor Romance, one of the Zinn daughters (sorry, I forget which one) physically transforms into a man, to escape from her marriage if I remember correctly. This is not done through surgery but “just happens”.
That’s the one I was trying to think of in the OP when I said I knew there was an obvious one I was missing.
That was a great book, the gender reassignment being the least of it. My favorite plotlines were the ones concerning Cal’s grandparents.
There’s a book entitled Chick for a Day, a collection of pieces in which guys get turned into women for 24 hours. It’s a companion to a book entitled Dick for a Day, in which women write about what they would do if they had a peenis for 24 hours. I note that the women don’t actuaslly “change sex” – they get a different piece of equipment. For guys, though, it’s the entire package.
The pieces go so far out of the way to be arty and seen as non-pornographic that they’re downright dull. A book like this, about sex, ought to be porn – but arty, classy porn.
(By the way, I note that the women, in the first book, end up doing things like wanting the penis on their forheads, so it’ll be prominent. Whatever men’s other faults may be, they never wanted to habve breasts or vaginas on their foreheads. Women are weird.)
Technically not. According to the crawl, Holly left and was replaced by Hilly, a version of the ship’s computer from “Parallel Universe.”
In Cordwainer Smith’s “The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdal,” an entire civilization (well, half of it, anyway) changes from female to male. It’s a great story (all of Smith’s are), though its 50’s assumptions of an all-male society are pretty offensive these days.
John Varley did sex changes a lot, it was one of the things that stood out when his fiction first was published. What made it interesting was that he postulated a society where sex changes were no big deal – you’d change your sex like changing an outfit. IIRC, “In the Bowl” was one that actually had a character change sex (the assuption was that, the first time, you’d be extremely interesting in trying things out), but other stories in his collections “The Persistence of Vision” and “Picnic on Nearside” (aka, “The Barbie Murders”), make reference to sex changes in passing (e.g., in “Overdrawn at the Memory Bank,” the protagonist’s lost body found having been mistakenly labelled to be prepped for a sex change).
“Steel Beach” was written in the same “Eight Worlds” universe. What is interesting was that Varley deliberately didn’t go back and read the earlier books and didn’t care that it was inconsistent with them.
Varley later wrote “Options,” set in an earlier time when sex changes had not been routine.
In one of David Gerald’s Chtorr series, a male telepath talks about changing bodies with a woman.
In an episode of Farscape, the crew switch bodies. John Crichton switches with Aeryn Sun; at one point she finds him with her uniform’s top off and fooling with her breasts. “You’re insane !”; “No, I’m a guy.”.
I came back to mention Dax, but I’ll just nitpick your spelling instead. 
Ezri, and Curzon. There was an episode where the symbionts bred in pools of white muck back on Trill. You didn’t miss much. There was also Odan, the original Trill on The Next Generation who turned from male to female. (In that episode it was implied that the symbiont completely subverted the personality of the Host, no merging, so it was truly a gender change.)
There was also an episode where Quark had to disguise himself as a woman for some reason, which would normally be crossdressing, not a gender change, but since Ferengi women don’t wear clothes, he had to be be temporarily surgically altered. So maybe it counts.
I think we missed another obvious couple of obvious ones: 1) Hewdig and the Angry Inch. 2) The girl in the Crying Game. Although I haven’t actually seen this one, so I don’t know how valid it is.
What about 3rd Rock from the Sun? Wasn’t Sally a male alien ihabiting a female body?
Then there’s the villian in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, and there was an FTM killer judge in an episode of CSI.