So many different reasons and each believes it is the true Gender Bender.
Gender Bender Type #1: “I don’t want to look at a guy’s butt.” The most basic, also sometimes an excuse for the other types. Similar to the “playing a female video game avatar,” except the equivalent of that would just be… just have a female protagonist? This Gender Bender type results from wanting cute girl interactions, but being insecure about being able to write “realistic female characters” when it comes to personality, thoughts and motivations, relationships and sexual desires, etc. So instead you have character with the outward appearance of a girl but the interior thoughts of a guy — and in the simplest ones, the internal self-perception and thought patterns never changes despite being embodied totally differently, as if mind and body are truly separate and Cartesian dualism is real. Also an excuse for girl-on-girl sex scenes, for the same reasons that straight guys watch girl-on-girl porn, I guess.
Gender Bender Type #2: “Fellas, is it gay to smile or like anything? NO ARGH I HATE IT” This type starts by observing that masculinity and expectations of men are really damn screwed up, and unless you ignore a lot of the “how to be an alpha guy / real man / best father” kind of over-the-top stuff, also extremely unhealthy for a man’s mind and life expectancy. Shockingly, many authors are not alpha dudes. However, in wish-fulfillment power fantasies, there’s also an expectation for a male protagonist to be able to beat Goku and Superman while also maintaining a harem and stoically not caring about any of it, etc etc. There are lots of reactions to this, “extremely nice guy hero who’s not always strong” is one of them, but “escape completely from male expectations by turning into a girl” is another one. It’s basically a more socially sophisticated version of #1.
Gender Bender Type #3: “Transformation is interesting experientially, socially… and ok, sexually.” This is the overlap zone with a lot of other transformation-driven fiction (werewolves, some furry stuff, a certain type of vampire fiction, etc) The process of transformation or becoming a very different kind of being is a very old trope in fiction, going back to Greek mythology in Europe and lots of other sources. And these early sources have all sorts of transformations — animals are probably the most common, but also trees, gods, objects, and yes, the other gender. There’s clearly interesting potential for storytelling, even some maybe meaningful stuff about self-discovery and the nature of identity and how we see the world and all of that, but all of these various kinds of transformation also have a fetish / smut version because of course they do. “What would sex be like if you turned into a [fill in the blank]” is an obvious thing that people are curious about, and some people are interested in the process of transformation, how it might mess with your mind, etc. This was true thousands of years ago. Apuleius, who wrote a story 1800 years ago about turning into a donkey, had smutty stuff about being a donkey. Tieresias, the mythological Greek seer who supposedly was around 4000 years ago, got turned into a girl and has been shown gender-bending in paintings and plays and stories ever since; the myths say that everyone wanted to know whether men or women have better orgasms. (Tiresias was like “female orgasm is 10x”).
Gender Bender Type #4: “It’s a way of writing about the trans experience.” Trans authors, regardless of gender, often encounter gender-bender fiction in the process of figuring out they’re trans, and for someone in that position gender-bender fiction is inherently wish fulfillment, or exploring something that might be their wish. So it’s not surprising that trans authors also write gender bender fiction, and the lens of a trans author is also a little more influenced by real life—but a fantastic gender-bender change, whether as an isekai or however, is also often a way less “problematic” way of changing genders, because it’s fantasy, right? It might be instant, or instantly accepted by everyone, or the MC is trans and gets to look exactly the way they always dreamed of, and so on and so forth. A lot of this is trans people writing about the trans experience, which is interesting for readers who are also trans, or trans-curious, figuring themselves out, or just care about trans people’s experience even if they’re not trans. The amount of smut in this category ranges widely from 0 to 100% SMUT, just like for many groups of people, just as there’s GL and BL that’s more or less smutty — but when trans stories are also “gender bender” then the sexual content often has to do with “becoming yourself and becoming comfortable in your body,” since that’s an understandably important part of positive sexual experiences for trans people.
Gender Bender Type #5: “I’m not trans well maybe I am but I can’t think about that, it makes me frustrated and pent-up, I need to read some gender bender stories for release!!” This might not be a distinct type, but it’s definitely a type of reader? There’s a bunch of fiction in category #4 on this site that’s kind of making fun of this kind of motivation by making the MC this kind of person, who has their “egg cracked” and figures out that they actually do want to gender-bend for real.
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