Why I don’t gender tropes, and why you shouldn’t do it either. 

Calling anything reverse—as in reverse harem, reverse age gap, or reverse grumpy/sunshine—has become increasingly popular. It’s something I see all the time on book promos, on bookstagram, and when authors and readers talk about books in general. 

While I understand the knee-jerk reaction to using these terms, here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t. 

Gendering tropes push (harmful) gender stereotypes.

Let’s start with the most obvious one. Taking a trope and putting reverse in front of it pushes the idea that there’s a default setting that is more accepted. A default most often bound in (harmful) gender stereotypes that women are still struggling against today.

For example, that women should smile and accept life without complaining (and most of us can agree that in 2025, we are so over having a man tell us to smile more), which in turn ties into the idea that women are still seen as overly emotional if they display any kind of feelings other than the “default setting” decided on by the patriarchy as being happy, smiling, kind, and demure. 

Another example is that a woman should automatically want an older man to take care of her (hello, 1950s) and that any woman wanting a younger man is stepping outside of the accepted norms. Why this is would be a whole essay on its own, but let’s just say that it plays heavily into the assumption that a man should be the head of a household and thus be the older, smarter, and more powerful in a couple, along with the idea that a woman has an expiration date, and a man shouldn’t want to go for a woman outside her prime. 

Which leads me to the second and biggest reason why you shouldn’t use “reverse” in front of tropes. 

It completely eliminates every lgbtq+ story from the narrative.

As soon as we accept that there’s a default setting and that anything not falling into that default setting is, therefore, a “reverse,” we erase every single lgbtq+ story from the narrative. 

An M/M romance, as an example, would not be able to fit any of those categories because if… 

grumpy = man 

sunshine = woman

…then we’re either implying that one of the people in the M/M relationship would have to take on the role of the woman, or we simply exclude them. Which once again shows the harmfulness of trying to gender these tropes. 

So the next time you’re talking about tropes, I urge you to drop the gendering and let tropes be tropes no matter what gender each person has. 

(Brought to you by my personal opinion – please remember I am, in fact, not the trope police, and you can do what you want)