Then you would need to avoid the stereotypes altogether. My point is that, if you use them, they need to be subverted. If you treat at face value you will be legitimately accused of sexism.
And, honestly, I don’t see how you can use boys from the 1960s and genderswap them without them learning lessons. Especially if you’re making it a comedy. One of the main things that’s funny about genderswap fiction is the guys not knowing how women really act, and thus looking like idiots.
The thing about an arc, even a slow one, is that it has to be kept up. This one hasn’t been. At this point in the series, the titular misfile is completely unimportant. You could just stick the characters into any other genderswap fiction. Heck, you could pretty much just make Ash a true trans man who for reasons has to hide it.
The series was very different at the beginning. It wasn’t just about one guy who was genderswapped and his relationship with a girl. It also involved this angel who screwed up and got kicked out of heaven and needed to do a bunch of good works in order to get them back. These good works took the form of him supernaturally helping people. At the same time, unbeknownst to him, his mistake was having horrible implications on the rest of heaven, causing all these problems.
And that’s not even mentioning that Emily’s story is pretty much resolved. She had a misfile, too, but she’s happy and come to terms with it. Now the only struggle left is typical high schooler stuff, trying to keep the balance between being a good student and having fun.
Go back and read from the beginning for a while, and then skip to the current strip. It’s a completely different series. And I think it’s good to warn people of this. If I’d have come in during this part of it, I wouldn’t have bothered reading, as the stuff that made it interesting is mostly gone. I only keep up because I’m waiting for the end where it will hopefully return to its roots.
I don’t know of any novels, but since you mention body swaps, I know of a kids brainswap book series called “Help, I’m Trapped…” that contains one called “Help, I’m Trapped in my Sister’s Body.” I actually never got a hold of that one, so I don’t know how good it is, but the ones I did read were pretty fun.
Orlando: A Biography, by Virginia Woolfe.
One quite interesting fantasy series that has a genderswap as a major plot point was L. Frank Baum’s original Oz series. The series gets a bit darker than the 1930’s movie (e.g. the Tin Woodsman is actually a Darth Vader-type cyborg who was originally human but was maimed and rebuilt, not a robot like he appears in the movie).
The genderswap moment comes when
Book #2 involves a young boy who gets involved in a quest to find a missing princess who was kidnapped as a baby by a witch. It turns out that the guilty witch is none other than the adoptive mother of the boy. Glinda interrogates the witch and forces her to divulge what she did with the princess. The witch reveals that she transformed the princess.
“Into what?”
“a boy”
So the book ends with the protagonist being told that he must return to his true form, the aforementioned princess. By book #3, she’s the most bouncy, bubbly, frilly pink girly-girl in the universe.
So she’s a girl who used to be a boy who used to be a girl. Fun.
I agree with the general opinion that some reader somewhere will be offended no matter what. I with hold judgement on whether you story is offensive until I have more information. ETA I’m guessing it won’t be. But, in this quantum mechanical universe can we be sure of anything?
I recall a two issue story arc in Justice League. A hidden civilization composed entirely of women (They were green skinned and lived under a valley. They were called The Dahls) comes into possession of the MacGuffin virus. Vixem, Gypsy, Maxima, Dolphin, and I think Wonder Woman, are called to duty as the Dahls refuse to let men visit. The Martian Manhunter uses his shape shifting to become a woman. Various stereotypes are explored. MM learns a lot about women. I found the whole thing funny and well written.
Genderswap is a fairly common theme in anime and manga – one subtheme being the male protagonist become a magical girl, whch tends to be done mostly for comic effect.
A well-done fairly realistic example (realistic that is, apart from the genderswap being carried out by alien space travellers) is Kashimashi: Girl Meets Girl. In it, the boy who becomes a girl accepts the gender change, but has to work through the problems of her new gender, as do her friends.
A long list of other examples can be found at TV Tropes under the title Gender Bender.
There’s Heinlein’s I will fear no evil, written long enough ago that it probably doesn’t provide a modern take on the issues involved. And, for varying definitions of “good,” there are the collected works of Jack L. Chalker.
You might like Cycler (The Big Idea: Lauren McLaughlin | Whatever) which is about a teenage girl who transforms into a boy for a few days each month. Her parents don’t make good decisions about the situation.
I was going to suggest that older science fiction/fantasy novels that are *about *genderswap tend to be fairly dire, mentioning these two, while novels that have genderswap *in the background *can be very good, and mention Tanith Lee’s *Don’t Bite the Sun *and Drinking Sapphire Wine, and John Varley’s Steel Beach.
Along these lines the Culture novels by Iain M Banks have quite a bit of gender-swapping. It depicts an extremely advanced space-faring society where changing sex is commonplace and something practically everyone does at least once in their lives, in fact one of the main characters is considered downright weird and something of a throwback because he has never been female or has the desire to give it a try.
I’m trans, and from my perspective it’s just fantasy and no big deal. Transphobic? Uh-uh, I’m not seeing it. One, it would have to have actual real-world significance, and two, it would have to involve denying actual trans men’s gender just because of their innies (even if fictional, but written as realistic fiction). That *would *be transphobic—but this ain’t it.
So Princess did you ever write your story?