April 10 2026, 08:15 
The developers behind Pokémon Champions, the newly released video game from the mega-popular monster-fighting cartoon franchise, announced that they will correct a bug that allowed Gallade, a male creature, to have a female gender marker. The temporary error prompted some fans to humorously declare that it allowed the creature to be “transgender.”
Screenshots of the game showed the Gallade, a fighting bipedal creature, with a female symbol (
) denoting its sex. However, the game has always had Gallade evolve from a male version of a Kirlia (a smaller, androgynous-looking creature); a female Kirlia evolves into Gardevoir, a fairy creature that floats in a long skir). The evolved males and females look distinctly different, a real-life biological phenomenon known as sexual dimorphism.
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Some fans of the game began referring to the female Gallade as a “transgender Gallade,” likely as a joke and as a way to insert LGBTQ+ content into the game. While LGBTQ+ content exists in Pokémon games, it has often been through subtle nods, character dialogue, and queer-coding rather than explicitly labeled representation.
congrats to this transgender gallade in champions
— GOOD NIGHT mr.coconut (@sweekun.bsky.social) 2026-04-08T23:14:12.131Z
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Though the game was just released this last Wednesday, in a statement released Thursday, the Pokémon Company said it would soon release a patch to fix several of the game’s bugs, including “an error of some genders of Pokémon in the tutorial and in released teams.”
The LGBTQ+ publication them noted that the Japanese dialogue from the 2013 role-playing video game Pokémon X/Y had the trainer Beauty Nova reveal that she was “reborn” as a Beauty (a female class trainer in the game) after originally being a Black Belt (a male class of trainer).
“A mere half year ago, I was a Black Belt! Quite the transformation, wouldn’t you say?” Beauty Nova says in the Japanese language version of the game. “I’ve recently remade my life completely! I’ve been reborn as a Beauty at last!”
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