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My female Charmeleon evolved into a male Charizard. How is this possible?
Charmeleon was from Diamond transferred to Pokemon X.

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    Err I have never seen such a thing... Do you have any evidence/record of this? Maybe if you didn't save your game after what happened?
    – Jerry
    May 8, 2014 at 6:04

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Barring a bug, hack or you simply being mistaken, evolution never changes gender, nor does anything else.

Gender, IVs, ability (barring the ability swap item), and personality are set in stone on generation of a pokemon and are never deliberately changed by game code in any generation of Pokemon (though trading from Gen 1 to Gen 2 assigns previously genderless pokemon a gender based on personality value).

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    Actually, female Azurill have a 1/3 chance of becoming male when they evolve (but it seems that was fixed in XY) — but this is the only exception to the "evolution never changes gender" rule.
    – jwodder
    May 8, 2014 at 16:43
  • That's what I thought but it happened. Charmander was from an egg bred under Diamond game, became Charmeleon and transferred to Black, to Pokebank then to X. I'm certain it was a female otherwise I would have not gone through the trouble of transferring it. Thanks for the info.
    – Sam
    May 9, 2014 at 2:36
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    @jwodder: I believe this is because Azurill was based on Cleffa's data, but they forgot to change things like catch rate (Azurill is harder to capture than Marill), and gender ratio.
    – Kamila Borowska
    May 10, 2014 at 16:59
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Many things, such as Gender, Ability, IVs, shininess, are all determined by the Personality Value, a hidden number that's basically the Pokémon's DNA in some ways.

However, it would be wasteful to calculate all of these things every single time the information is needed, therefore the information is also stored separately from the value. This is what allows hacks like "Wonder Guard Spiritomb" to exist.

When evolution occurs, the personality value is re-evaluated. This is to allow ability changes, in cases where different stages of evolution have access to different abilities. For example, Scatterbug changes from Shield Dust or Compoundeyes, to Shed Skin when it evolves into Spewpa, and back to Shield Dust or Compoundeyes when it becomes Vivillon. Without the personality value, the ability might end up different between Scatterbug and Vivillon.

Anyway, it is possible that your Diamond game erroneously recorded your Charmeleon's gender as female, despite its personality value indicating a male. Such a glitch is, of course, highly unlikely, but I had a friend whose game allowed them to teach the Thunderbolt TM to a Vaporeon so... -shrugs-

If this was indeed the case, then X/Y would have recalculated the information based on the personality value upon evolution, thus causing your Charizard to switch genders.

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  • Perhaps the calculation changed slightly from Diamond to XY?
    – Yamikuronue
    May 12, 2014 at 13:59
  • Thanks Niet. I might experiment on this. I have half a dozen male charmander and will transfer all to Pokemon X and see if the gender will change if it evolve :).
    – Sam
    May 15, 2014 at 7:16
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I had a male frokie that evolved into a female frogadier for some reason which is odd since starters have only a 12.5 chance of being female.

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Certainly is possible, it happened to me with an Arcanine (even called 'Andrew'!) transferred from HeartGold to X.

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