A person is either part of a certain category (such as a certain species or gender) that they do not feel all right with, and so they want to be part of a different category, or the person was assigned a certain category (often against their will) that they feel have never belonged to in the first place or some combination of both. Because of this, the person may want or need to change their body or nature or both.
In fiction, Trans Nature can take any form, especially in fantasy and science fiction. Note that trying to regain your true form (after having been cursed, for example) does not count. Starting to identify with your new form does, however.
When a character is a fictional kind of Trans Nature, it is often a big part of this character being a hero or villain: Either they’re a member of an oppressive/evil group transitioning to become one of the good and/or oppressed people, or we have a "traitor" who identifies with the "wrong" group.
It can also work as an inversion of Internalized Categorism: Bob thinks men/humans are bad, but instead of denying himself the good things about being a man/human or doing bad things because he thinks that this is what being a "real" man/human means, he instead stops being a man/human — magically changing into something else.
Expect the character to be in a world of trouble if there is No Transhumanism Allowed.
May be caused by Humanity Is Infectious, or inversions thereof. In some cases, Trans Nature leads to Humanity Ensues. Note, however, that that trope is usually not combined with Trans Nature – instead, the animal resents having been transformed to a human. One very common form of Trans Nature is Become a Real Boy: a robot, living doll or whatever wanting to become a real human.
Supertrope of Trans Tribulations (for transgender characters) and Become a Real Boy. Sometimes a Sister Trope of Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence. Compare Rainbow Lens, which is when a character’s story is seen as being a metaphor for being trans. Compare and contrast The Whitest Black Guy and Becoming the Mask. Can be seen as a more serious take on Delusions of Doghood and (the more extreme cases of) Absurd Career Goals.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
- Shokora from Massugu ni Ikou is a dog who thinks he's a human. It's because his owner, "Mama" as he calls her, always told him he was a member of the family, rather than a pet. At the end of the episode, he's begun to think he's a cat.
Asian Animation
- Bread Barbershop: In "Crab or Cracker", a crab cracker kid goes through a phase where he thinks he's a crab and wants to live in the ocean with the other sea animals. Bread perpetrates a plan to scare the kid out of being a crab by having some customers come in and pretend to get makeovers that look like real ocean animals, including some of their more grotesque details like veins on a fish's eyes.
Comic Books
- Auntie Agathas Home For Wayward Rabbits: Buster is a dog who identifies as a rabbit, wearing a rabbit mask everywhere he goes and demanding to be referred to as such. To their credit, the other rabbits at Agatha's are accepting, and are implied to still invite him to every rabbit gathering (As he's hurt when he thinks they rejected him from one in issue #6).
- Fables:
- We have the fox Reynard who is attracted to female humans and wants to become a human so he can seduce them. This wish is eventually granted by the witches, making him a shapeshifter with a beautiful male human form.
- We also have some cases of regular Become a Real Boy, with Pinocchio himself and some of the wooden soldiers becoming human.
- Transmetropolitan: One of Spider's first interviews upon his career resurrection is with the Transients, a group of former humans genetically transitioning into aliens and hoping to migrate off-planet. Fred Christ, the leader of the local branch, points out that being able to transform into animals has been possible for a while, but nobody was interested until becoming a sapient humanoid was an option. Despite this, some background characters appear to be animal Transients (Such as a pantherine civilian in Issue 7), but whether they're this or an Uplifted Animal can be tricky to tell.
Fan Works
- Anthropology: One of the most well known depictions of Lyra Heartstrings as a trans-human. She's depicted as having wanted to be more human since childhood, developing spells to partially change her body and changing her name to be less Equestrian sounding. She eventually finds out this is because she is a human, literally forced into the wrong body after somehow transmigrating dimensions and being adopted by a unicorn couple. When she reads The Last Unicorn, she's even angered at the idea that Lady Amalthea wouldn't want to become a human like her.
- In Vathara's Walk Through the Valley
, Hiko turns himself into one of the less obvious examples of a Gender inverted Cat Girl in fiction. He has retractable Absurdly Sharp Claws hidden under fingernails, Innate Night Vision so acute that he's blind without his Cool Shades, sensory tendrils, parental instincts that almost drove him to kill a friend because she didn't smell or feel right, eternal youth and an interpretation of the original canon's ki-sense that basically makes him The Empath. That is, if they could sense trees and animals. Also, he can project images as well as emotion. He's implied to have a hell of a Healing Factor. Making these changes permanent is a felony in the Confederacy—he worked for a hidden branch of its government—and the reader is never given a coherent reason why he'd risk prison and the end of a brilliant career to do this; he and Shakku Arai, his partner-in-crime (literally) had invented anti-aging drugs before he took the serum that would have allowed him to restore his banged up knees and bad back without touching his wrinkles...or the middle-aged spread he must have avoided somehow; he wasn't in do-or-die situation; and then there's this weird line that suggests that even if Hiko isn't consciously aware of any species dysphoria, Arai is:
Arai: I hate what I'm doing, yes,... [b]ut you, Hiko - you hate what you are." (A flicker of humor.) "Or I should say, what you were. - One joke in Asylum (Daemon of Decay) has Twilight talking to a donkey who is delusional and believes she's a unicorn.
- The "permanent magical transformation" support group in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic Clair de Lune usually acts as a transgender support group, however it is a support group for all kinds of transformations. One member is a unicorn, Green Wheat, who was born an earth pony. She felt uncomfortable being an earth pony so she turned into a unicorn. It's legal to change breeds but there's a stigma against it.
- Species Identity Disorder revolves around Weiss wishing she was a faunus.
Films — Animation
- Cookie from Charlie the Wonderdog is a dog who identifies as a cat, and that's how Puddy accepts him into his feline gang.
- King Louie from The Jungle Book (1967), an orangutan wanting to become a human.
- In The Lion King (2019), Zazu the hornbill mentions having a cousin who thought he was a woodpecker and would regularly get concussions from slamming his head against trees.
- In The Little Mermaid (1989), Princess Ariel of the Mer-people has a fixation with humans, eventually falling in love with a human and becoming one herself. In this version of the story, humans and merpeople are portrayed as equal, so Ariel's transformation isn't about becoming better or worse.
- Ellie the mammoth in Ice Age: The Meltdown believes herself to be a possum. When Manny tries to convince her she's a mammoth by pointing out her tracks are identical to his, she insists they're his tracks. She eventually realises the truth, though.
- Lulu Is a Rhinoceros: As the title suggests, Lulu is a bulldog who identifies as a rhino. Despite trying to remain optimistic and secure in her identity, circumstance and judgement leads her to worry she doesn't fit the image of her desired species. At the conclusion, she finally works up the nerve to approach and talk to a group of rhinos at a festival in her city.
- Louis, the alligator from The Princess and the Frog, wants to be human so that he can play trumpet in a jazz band. He doesn't become human, but still gets his wish to play in a band.
- Wolfwalkers : When Robyn becomes one of the Wolfwalkers, she is initially very freaked out, but she quickly comes to embrace her new nature when Mebh shows her the benefits of being a wolf and the freedom it affords her compared to life in the town.
Films — Live-Action
- In Avatar, our protagonist takes Going Native to the logical conclusion, ending the movie with literally becoming a Na'vi.
- In Mammoth, our failed Mighty Whitey protagonist falls in love with a Thai woman and is quite shocked that she thinks men are better than women and that it's okay because she can be a man in her next life if she is good enough. His wannabe-feminist preaching fails to impress her.
- Ma Vie En Rose: Ludovic clearly feels transgender at seven. She may or may not grow up still feeling that way. Chris may be transgender as well, being assigned female at birth but much preferring to dress in a masculine way and play with boys (basically Ludovic's opposite).
- Howard Howe, the main villain in Tusk seems to want to be a walrus since he was rescued by a walrus from a burning boat when he was young. He talks about it several times while taking on the hero. Instead, he makes the hero into a walrus for the rest of the film.
Literature
- One of Stephanie Plum's nieces wants to be a pony when she grows up.
- The Merry Gentry series has a number of people who want to be sidhe and often mimic them by dyeing their hair an unnatural red or getting plastic surgery to get their ears pointed. The latter is laughed at by real sidhe because only half breeds have pointed ears. One of Merry's coworkers in the first book is a former human gang member who rescued a couple of Unseelie nobles in exchange for being made one of the fey. He's now basically an anthropomorphic, bipedal cat.
- Averted in Original Sin: It's very popular amongst trendy young humans in the 40th century to undergo radical cosmetic surgery that makes you look like an alien ("body bepple"). The Doctor explains that this doesn't mean they actually like aliens; like many empires, the Earth Empire has a fascination with its vassal states' cultures but contempt for the bearers of said culture.
- In Cornelia Funke's Reckless, the girl known as Fox was given the ability to change into a fox after helping a wounded vixen, and much prefers that form to her original human one. At least until she realizes that she's fallen in love with Jacob (who is human).
- Briefly mentioned in Outcast of Redwall: Jodd the hare was raised by squirrels and wishes to be one, to the point that he ties his tail to his ears in the hope of stretching it longer.
- The Neil Gaiman short story "Changes" has elements of this. A drug designed to cure cancer has the "side effect" of completely changing a person's biological sex. A biological female who takes the drug will become a biological male and vice versa. It's mentioned that the drug has made sex-change operations obsolete, though some people take it to recreationally change sex.
- In Reaper Man, the soon-to-be-dying wizard Windle Poons says at his Going-Away Party that he's considering being reincarnated as a woman. His colleagues are a little bit taken aback.
- The Librarian, of course, is perfectly content to remain an ape, even if his transformation from a human wasn't actually by choice. Colleagues who'd known him before are now of the opinion that he was always an orangutan deep down, he'd just started out looking human due to an accident of birth.
- Discworld dwarfs are facing a kind of cultural revolution of a trans natured kind. Most of dwarf culture centres around stereotypically masculine things, like armour, weapons, drinking and mining. All dwarfs dressed the same, grew their beards long, and used male pronouns for themselves. Most of dwarf "sexuality" consisted of finding out what physical sex your lover was before you got married, not that it would change anything. But recently, some dwarfs have been daring to be more feminine. No shaving, obviously, but maybe wearing very slightly lighter chainmail or a shinier axe. Maybe even lipstick or a chainmail skirt. Of course, since dwarf gender is so optional, it still doesn't mean that they necessarily do have female body parts. Just that they choose to be perceived that way.
- Captain Carrot Ironfounderson, as evidenced by his name, is a dwarf. He is also, through accident of birth, a six-foot-tall human king. But he sees no reason why that should stop him being a dwarf, just like adoptive Dads. Nor does he see why some funny crown birthmark, fancy sword, and "royal ancestry" should make him have to be King of Ankh Morpork. He would much rather work his way up the ranks of the Ankh Morpork City Watch by the sweat of his brow. This species dysphoria may be what helps him understand Angua, his werewolf girlfriend. As far as dwarfs (even fundamentalist conservatives) are concerned his status as a dwarf is unquestionable since he practices their not-religion and culture; it's humans that have a hard time wrapping their heads around it.
- Speaking of Angua, Discworld werewolves are notably not "human most of the time". They are always a werewolf. They just happen to be human-shaped a lot of the time and wolf-shaped at least some of the time. Meanwhile, Wolfmen are the same but the opposite way around. Many werewolves/wolfmen have problems changing shape, in fact. Some can only change in the moonlight, or not at all, as evidenced by Angua's sister, who could not change into a wolflike shape, and one of her brothers who cannot change into a humanlike shape but chose to pass as a champion sheepdog in Lancre. Apparently werewolves and wolfmen are simply two different examples of the same species (which can interbreed with human and canine biology).
- The children's picture book Goblinheart: A Fairy Tale uses this as a metaphor for transgender youth. Julep is a fairy who insists they're a goblin. Julep meets a younger goblin named Tuck who is the opposite.
- The Art of Racing in the Rain is a book about a labrador retriever mix who wants to reincarnate into a human. It's based on a Mongolian legend where dogs can reincarnate into humans if they prepare enough.
- Bubba the harpy eagle from Frost Dancers was raised by humans and thinks he's a man, albeit a special kind of man that can fly.
- Tobias of Animorphs took to morphing early and loved taking the shape of a red-tailed hawk, comparing returning to human form to going back to prison. This led to him entering a serious mission already morphed and subsequently falling afoul of Shapeshifter Mode Lock. While he struggles a great deal with the consequences of this, including attempting suicide and trying and failing to see himself as either all human or all hawk, ultimately he comes to see himself as both. At one point when presented with an opportunity for an impossible boon, he refuses to say what he wants; Tobias tells the others it was to be human again, but the boon he's given is to regain the morphing power and be able to participate with the others - and after "human" becomes one of the morphs he can take, he's happy with this. He hated his human life.
- From that book on every time Tobias is in human morph he's intensely awkward and uncomfortable... except in book 43, where he morphs into a beautiful teenaged girl, at which point he delights in the attention he gets from everyone around him and recovers gracefully from verbal missteps. This is also the book where he most closely examines the choices he made before being stuck as a hawk and determines that he was using bird shape to avoid his problems - which include "being a boy".
- A Fox Called Herbert by Margaret Sturton involves a rabbit named Herbert attempting to live as a fox, which can be interpreted as a metaphor for childhood gender dysphoria, though the book's official blurb presents it as a Be Yourself story. At first his mother insists he's just being silly, until a heated argument with Herbert convinces her otherwise and she has a change of heart at the end, as evidenced by this Wham Line:
Herbert's mother: Oh, Herbert... you are my fox.
- In Pale, Verona Hayward struggles with her desire to leave her humanity behind and become Other, seeking magic that changes her form, alters her Self, and distances her from her human life. While much of this desire fades as she cuts ties with her abusive father, accepts her sexuality, and finds new passions, she continues to title herself a master of halflight, shadow, and shape, and regularly takes the form of a cat and flirts with Otherhood.
- Maricica, a Fae of the Court of Autumn Below, desires nothing more than to escape the exhausting, paranoid existence of the Fae, which is filled with schemes and has brought her only pain. She conspires to make herself a goddess, shedding the title of Fae, but ultimately she still uses Fae methods, making promises whose meaning she twists and always scheming. Thus, Guilherme of the Winter Court argues that she remains Fae-and indeed, in their final duel he is able to effortlessly predict her movements and land the final blow based on his long observation of her Fae self, both defeating her and demonstrating that she has failed to change her nature.
Live-Action TV
- Creepshow: "Shapeshifters Anonymous": Phyllis is a human woman who regularly attends meetings of Werebeasts. Despite not being a shapeshifter like them, she insists she's a hippo at heart and has a suit she wears on full moons with the others, who accept her into their group anyway. When she faces down Santa Claus, a Werebeast hunter, she gets angry when he tells her he doesn't intend to kill her because she's human.
- In both continuities of V, alien lizards are evil. Those lizards who side with humanity stop having a real lizard mind, instead developing human personalities/emotions.
- In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, at least two episodes are about regular humanoid Trill wanting to transition to become "Joined Trill". A Joined Trill is a composite species, with one humanoid component (normally from the Trill race, though a human was briefly joined in one TNG episode) and one symbiont. Becoming a Joined Trill brings on many changes, including a form of reincarnation: You retroactively gain past lives in the form of the symbiont's former hosts and their memories, and after your death, you will continue to live on as one of these past lives for subsequent hosts.
- Trill must be trained and prepared for a long time before Joining, if they are good enough to be selected, or they may become a person that is far more like past host personalities than the current host's previous personality. Will Riker, who had no idea what symbiosis was like at all, was entirely submerged without realizing that there was any alternative. Ezri Tigan, a humanoid Trill who was forced into Joining by circumstance, had at least grown up in a Trill culture and though she experienced a rough and prolonged transition period (full of weird cravings and feelings from her past lives), she kept most of her personality. The most immediately jarring part was that her then-boyfriend suddenly reminded her of her son from a past life, squicking her out and ruining the relationship.
- Trill society has a strong taboo against Joined Trill carrying over relationships from previous lives. This is to discourage Joined Trill from marrying their partners across multiple lives and/or taking on multiple roles that will perpetuate centuries-long rule of elite Nth Doctors. The general rule seems to also trend to professions that the symbiont has not experienced, in order to make a more Renaissance man.
- In Star Trek: Voyager, the AI called "The Doctor" as well as the former Borg drone Seven Of Nine are both transitioning. Unlike their predecessor Data from TNG, however, they do not want to become humans. Instead, they are trying to grow into something new, despite the Captain's bias towards the concept of their "humanity" being developed.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia has Maureen Ponderosa, who started identifying mentally as cat after having her "death tooth" finally fixed and eventually having too many cats made her snap and begin have various cosmetic surgery procedures done in order to develop more cat-like features and she wants everyone calls her as cat while on trial.
The Lawyer: Maureen, you are the sister of Bill Ponderosa, and it was at your wedding that Liam got attacked?
Maureen: Meow.
Lawyer: Your Honor, nothing represents the tragic aftermath more than the dramatic transformation of this woman.
Maureen: Cat.
Lawyer: ... Excuse me?
Maureen: As I transition from woman to cat, I must insist on being referred to as a cat.
Jack: Objection. She's not a cat, Your Honor.
Maureen: [hisses aggressively at Jack] - One case in Caso Cerrado revolves around a man called Tiko who believes he's a cat and is trying to transition to the best of his abilities. Tiko's stepmother, however, argues that he's mentally ill and can't inherit his deceased father's inheritance.
Tabletop Games
- In Shadowrun, elves are a subrace of humanity. Some normal humans are "elf wannabees" who want to be elves and sometimes use plastic surgery to make themselves more elf-like. They're usually looked down upon by real elves and other humans.
- There also exist "ork posers" (which can be both humans and elves). Ork posers can also take this route towards being orks, although the flaw description implies most of them still consider themselves their old race and just want to hang out in ork circles because they're cool. Orks don't discriminate between the two and just find them all annoying, though some ork groups will accept posers who act orky enough.
- In Feng Shui, the Ascended are an Ancient Conspiracy of intelligent animals who used magic to become human and then took over the world to prevent the same magic from being used to return them to animal form.
- In Eclipse Phase Body Dysmorphia is not uncommon due to casual use of Brain Uploading to switch bodies, and the Fall limiting most people's choices in bodies. Fortunately, bodysculpting, including sex changes, is cheap, but it has limits and bodies are expensive.
- The Transhuman supplement introduces a variant specifically for asyncs, Species Dysmorphia, which causes the afflicted to believe themselves to be some sort of Starfish Alien.
Video Games
- Contact (2006): Mochi is a space dog who wants to be a space cat. It meows and plays with a scratching post and is generally adorable, so it's doing a pretty good job of it.
- Dragon Age: The Qunari people run into this a lot because of their unusual approach to gender roles. Several jobs are strictly single gender; for instance, all soldiers are men, and all merchants are women. Therefore, a soldier who was incidentally born a woman is considered a man and expected to live as a man (Aqun-Athlok in their language). The result is that a trans man who is a soldier is completely unremarkable to them, but a cis woman who is a soldier is so far outside their worldview they can't really grasp the concept.
- Look Outside: Implied. Louis, one of the protagonist's neighbors, is an avid furry with a dragon fursuit. When the apocalypse happens and people start mutating, he wears the suit for protection, but admits to secretly hoping he would fuse with his suit and become a true dragon, as is a common trope in furry TF stories. When the zipper won't work, he becomes very excited thinking it's happened, and calls it his dream. Unfortunately, his mind starts to go not long after, and he quickly loses lucidity as the mutation becomes worse than just Becoming the Costume.
- The Talos Principle 2: Spugna (932) has dysphoria about being a robot and wishes for a human body.
- Twisted-Wonderland: Azul Ashengrotto is based on both Ursula and Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989). He is a cecaelia who grew up bullied for his ugly appearance and physical weakness; he desires to live on land as a human so much that in the present day, he refuses to revert to his true form even when traveling under the sea.
- Due to their already Transhuman nature, the cybernetic Solaris of Warframe aren't especially attached to bodies per se, with regular mention of modifying or trading in organs, limbs, and entire portions of their anatomy to their exploitative corporate overlords, the Corpus. As a result, transgenderism doesn't seem to raise any issues on Fortuna, such that the trangender Ticker doesn't have to hide her nature. Despite a masculine voice and facial features, Ticker identifies as female, and it is accepted to the point that no one feels a need to mention it. To everyone, she simply is Ticker.
Visual Novels
- Gnosia: Chipie is a current human who is working to have his mind transferred into a cat body. The process is long and arduous, and at the time of the story he's only succeeded in fusing the two bodies together, so that both human and cat face emote as one. He confesses that he much prefers the company of animals, and has always wanted to be a cat. The epilogue confirms that he ends up going all the way through with it, seemingly much happier.
Web Animation
- One short from Cyanide and Happiness both plays and mock this concept with a grown man who literally dress in a fox costume and thinks that he's a "Pyro" Fox from "forest planet", while his mother is trying to kill him because she can't accept his new identity.
- JAMIEvstheVOID: In "I BELIEVED I was a Unicorn...", Jamie recalls that after seeing The Last Unicorn on TV at age five, they were convinced that they really were - and should be - a unicorn.
Webcomics
- Gunnerkrigg Court:
- Reynard the Fox also appears in Gunnerkrigg Court, and true to the myth, he fell in love with a human woman. Rather than shapeshifting, however, he convinced Coyote to grant him the power to possess anything with eyes—and he uses it to take the body of a young human male so he can go to the court and woo his beloved...
- There is a Test that, if taken and passed, allows the test-ee to abandon their old nature and become something new. Humans can become animals and move to Gillitie (like the Kershaw family did), while animals and fantasy creatures can become humans and move to the Court (like Red and Blue did).
- El Goonish Shive features regular genderswapping with the aid of magic and a superscience transformation gun:
- Averted by Justin, who dislikes being temporarily female at a transgender birthday party.
- Averted by Sarah, who enjoys being temporarily male for the party, but is otherwise female.
- Possibly played straight by Susan. Her time as a male apparently felt little different to being female, to her surprise. She also trades uniforms with Tedd, because their school has gender-specific uniforms and they both prefer the opposing gender uniform.
- Played with by Tedd, whose androgynous looks cause people to assume that he is a girl anyway. He developed the genderswapping features on the transformation gun just so that he could actually switch back and forth whenever he wanted to, but mostly because he's a Chivalrous Pervert and proud of it. Eventually he is indicated to be gender-fluid, but that he didn't know that was a thing you could be, and just thought his interest in sometimes but not always being a girl was a result of being raised in an environment with regular contact with shapeshifters and eventually having access to the technological ability to switch sexes. Tedd, after being informed it had a label by Grace and given magic to swap genders whenever he feels the need, comes out to some of his friends as Gender Fluid, not that this changes his/her behavior much. The author and various characters start referring to Female Tedd with female after this, with no complaints from Tedd. That said regardless of form Tedd is largely only attracted to women. (Though transforming via the Transformation gun makes straight swaps Bi, it's apparently only physical, not romantic, as noted by Ellen)
- Subverted by Grace. She has shapeshifting powers anyway and her sense of self has absolutely no ties to outer appearance in any way.
- Played straight to the hilt by Ellen & Elliot! At first, Elliot was Tedd's much more obviously male friend. He also started off normal to counter Tedd's "Mad Scientist" theme, though that soon got replaced with a Magic Versus Science theme when he was revealed to be skilled at "Anime Style Martial Arts" including projecting spells from his hands (and then abandoned entirely when it turned out that Tedd's Mad Science was actually magic anyway). He gets hit by the "Venus" transformation (becoming an extremely attractive, long-haired girl for a month), he demands that Tedd get him a quicker cure (so as to avoid going to high school with an attractive girl's body for a month). Tedd finds out about a crystal that gets rid of transformative "curses", which should work since the gun is based on alien Magitek. They find the crystal and Elliot touches it. Long story short, it split him into two people. "Elliot" who got to keep his name (because he was the male one) but now has to burn off his excess magical energy once a day by spending a few hours as a woman. "Ellen", who was created from the "curse" that was removed, is permanently a woman now and only slowly coming to terms with the thought that she might be okay with that. But she still remembers having been a man, mind and body, all her life as well as not being able to date Sarah, the girl she remembers as her girlfriend. She also has the ability to use the anime martial arts but has decided to pursue magic more in order to differentiate herself from Elliot, although she really likes to use her own "Venus" transformation on him, via a hand beam spell that looks like the TF gun's beam. As the strip explores this further, Ellen says she has never felt gender dysphoria over her situation, and doesn't remember ever feeling it as Elliot either, leading Elliot to conclude that he's "gender casual". When he's told he no longer needs to transform to burn off energy, he initially tries to argue against this, before admitting he just wants to.
- Grace's brother, Vlad, is a male bat-human hybrid who can't change into human form permanently because it's too painful. After being hit by Ellen's Venus transformation, he turns into a human woman and is thrilled to be human for once (s/he takes the female part of things in stride since it matters very little compared to being human).
- Concession mentions species change surgery as a one-off joke, then much later introduces the minor character Clarissa who considers herself a human trapped in an anthro hamster's body, so she shaves her fur and blunts her claws. She is on medication for depression, like many trans people.
- In 21st Century Fox there's a couple of comics in which a male rabbit undergoes species and sex reassignment surgery to become a female skunk (modeled after the protagonist of Sabrina Online). One of the surgeons states that technology has advanced to the point where they cloned the appropriate reproductive organs for her, but any kits she bore would be rabbits rather than skunks, and the tail was bionic.
- This is a common trait of Heroes of Space in Homestuck. Jade is a member of the Furry Fandom, Kanaya wants to be a rainbow drinker and Calliope wants to be a troll. This applies to none more than Calliope, who is a Cherub and by her species standards is supposed to grow up alone in conflict with an Evil Twin she's Sharing a Body with. Unlike the rest of her species, she was lovingly raised by Gamzee, fostering a love of trolls and a hatred of being a cherub. Circumstances eventually lead to Jade becoming half-dog and Kanaya a vampire, but Calliope's character arc ends with her being married to someone that loves who she is.
- Kevin & Kell:
- Bruno is a wolf who identifies as a herbivore, eventually getting surgery to install extra stomachs, and cosmetic surgery to make himself look more like a ram. To compound the metaphor, he's faced discrimination from herbivores that think only those born as herbivores are true herbivores, accusations that he'll go back to his wolf like nature, and in 2025, when R.L. was elected president, Bruno became the target of threats after a law passed requiring people to present as the species they were born as, which forced Bruno to go into hiding in the rabbit warren.
- While Angelique initially became a rat for legal reasons, she later says she feels more comfortable than she did as a rabbit.
- In Shortpacked!, when Ultra-Car becomes a Robot Girl, she calls herself "trans-chassis".
- Skin Horse:
- When the team first meet Nick, they conclude that because he's human (albeit one who had his brain removed and stuck in a helicopter) his problems don't fall under their purview. When he refers to the helicopter as his "real body" they decide that since he identifies as non-human he should be treated as such. To compound things further, some of his memory backups become trans women.
- Goes the other way in the "Grillo Parlante" storyline, where Nera and Jonah meet a support group for transgenics who not only identify as normal humans but are trying to will themselves into developing a Weirdness Censor.
- Jess Star from Sam & Fuzzy is a ten-foot pustulating slug monster with Voluntary Shapeshifting powers. She identifies as a human woman in her twenties (to be specific, a human woman with Voluntary Shapeshifting powers) and takes that shape as her Shapeshifter Default Form.
- TwoKinds: The Order of Adrakist worships dragons, viewing them as life forms superior to the gods. Seraphina the heretic took it further and magically modified herself to become part-dragon. Her ultimate ambition is to change her entire body into a dragon.
Web Video
- Critical Role has Nott, the self-loathing good-aligned goblin who believes goblins are all irredeemably evil and who views herself as a halfling trapped in a goblin's body. She uses illusion spells, when possible, to pass herself off as a halfling, and her goal for adventuring is find magic powerful enough to permanently polymorph her into a halfling. In Episode 49, it's revealed that she was literally forcibly turned into a goblin; she regains her original halfling body in Episode 97.
Western Animation
- American Dad! have couple of villains in earlier seasons who have this mindset.
- In the episode All About Steve, there is a (possibly the first otherkin villain in a cartoon) Tolkien fan who also happens to be a domestic terrorist. It maybe cryptically implies that he's either literally Bilbo Baggins trapped inside a human body or just a misguided depressed fan who was done with being human by becoming a "dwarf" and believing that human society must be destroyed in order to create his magical utopia modeled after Middle Earth by any means.
- In another episode, Finances With Wolves, there is another villain, an eco-terrorist named Arboreus, that believes he is a tree trapped inside a human body. This is his major excuse for doing these extreme tactics, and he also has plans to replace his private parts with acorns.
- Big City Greens has Melissa, a goat who, according to Tilly, “has the soul of a dog”.
- Uncle Ruckus from The Boondocks, a self-racist black man who believes that he's really (or at least wants to be) a white man; you could call him trans-racial. He even had a dream about going to Heaven and turning white.
- One episode of The Powerpuff Girls (2016): features a colt who wants to be a unicorn. Bubbles get the Professor to turn him into a unicorn but it backfires and he transforms into a monstrous-looking creature. Eventually, his mother appears and informs him he really was a unicorn the entire time, it's just his mane covered up his horn.
- The South Park episode "Mr. Garrison's Fancy New Vagina" is about this trope and later downplayed it, focusing not only on the title character but on Kyle and his dad as well. Mr. Garrison gets a "vaginoplasty" to become a woman, Gerald gets a "dolphinoplasty" to become a dolphin, and Kyle gets a "negroplasty" to become tall and black. In the end, Mr. Garrison wanted a "peniplasty" note to become a man again after realizing that he's "just a guy with a mutilated penis". However, his genitalia was used for surgically altering Kyle and Gerald, and since his testicles were used for Kyle's knees, they break, leaving Mr. Garrison as a woman until he grew new genitalia on a mouse.
Doctor: (on negroplasty) It's a fairly common procedure, really. Just the reverse of a caucasioplasty just like Michael Jackson had.
- Afterwards, in the case of Kyle and his dad, this was never mentioned again possibly due to using Garrison's sexual parts without noticing causing them dramatized for not doing this again.
- Teacher's Pet (2000) is about a dog who wants to be a boy.
- Young Justice (2010): M'gann revisits Mars in Phantoms to prepare for her wedding with Conner. During a heated argument with her sister M'ree, she briefly switches from her white-skinned humanoid form to her White Martian form to make a point about how her race or caste do not define who she is. Their mother J'ann then intervenes and points out that M'gann used to transform into a Green Martian while growing up in an attempt to put up with everyone's racism; while it never really worked because everyone could just read her psychic signal and see past her disguise, J'ann tells M'gann that when she transformed back into a White Martian moments ago it felt just as "psychically false", meaning that her humanoid form has become the true reflection of who and what M'gann is in the present.
Real Life
- Trans people are assigned a gender at birth, usually based on their physical sex, that does not match their self-identified gender later in life. Sometimes occurs due to Intersexuality, i.e. physically being in between male and female or not fitting easily into one or the other, or on rare occasions when something happens to their genitals such as a botched circumcision. Most often the infants are assigned to be female. The whole situation is very contentious in the Trans community and Anti-trans/Transphobes.
- The small rise of ethnic plastic surgery and "Transracialism" or Transracial is most known for controversy in recent years due to some people thinking they were born the wrong race.
- There are also religious examples, mostly tied to belief in reincarnation — since men have higher social status, many Hindu and Buddhist women openly hope to be male in the next life, while still having an entirely female gender identity in this life.
- That kind of "trans nature" is pretty common in patriarchal cultures. In some rural regions of Albania, women can, if they have no brothers or other male relatives, go through a ritual that makes them men for the purpose of the law, and enables them to get all the benefits awarded to males, at the price of never being able to have children or marry, as "sworn virgins". Those women are usually not trans as it is understood in the medical sense, they're fine with a female body, just not with the oppression to which they are subjected - and sometimes they're forced to officially change gender because the family needs a male head. It is slowly dying out as society becomes more equal.
- Otherkin. To quote WikiFur, "Otherkin are those who believe that their physical forms do not define or fully encompass their mental states, personality, psychology, or spiritual nature." See the full article here.
- And some furries or "Furry lifestylers" as well. These most often take the route of reincarnation much like the aforementioned religions or people waiting for biotechnology to become real-life Beast Men. Comparing them to transgender people is considered a Berserk Button to most trans groups.
- A third piece to this puzzle would be anyone with other extreme views on body alteration. Some body art and cosmetic surgery won't get you any out of the normal attention, but some do cross deeper inside. People who partake in transforming themselves into living dolls, have overly tattooed or pierced bodies, or have done something considered a "self-mutilation" can all fall into this category. Any such people clearly follow the philosophy a human should alter their body to how they prefer it to look. Even where there are points of similarities, there are significant portions of the trans and furry communities that want nothing to do with them and probably vice versa.note