Calicos are usually female, but it is not guaranteed.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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Male calicos need to be XXY instead of XY. They're almost always female, with males being very noteworthy. Only 1 in 3000 calicos is male.
Fun fact: while almost all calico cats (tricolor coat) are female, around 1 in 3,000 are males with an extra X chromosome, a condition known as Klinefelter syndrome. As a result, they are almost always sterile. About 1 in 10,000 male calicos are fertile.
Also, around 80% of orange cats are male.
My friend had a male calico who was very much not sterile... at least not until the parents were required to neuter...
That's genuinely awesome stats you're claiming! I feel doubly blessed for my orange little lovely lady who ran the house.
Her bigger also orange twin brother? Dominated. The big fuckoff dog? Dominated. She ran the indoor animals.
The only animal she didn't run over was our elder statesmen cat, who was big and brilliant in equal measure. My dear boy was the largest cat I ever saw, and would understand language to a frightening degree."Go see X", "Come Here", "stop", and any mention of "Vet" was well interpreted :)
Are the Organge ones and Calicos of the same breed?
Orange and calico are just some of the possible colorings of a cat’s fur and don’t determine its breed (although some breeds are known for having distinctive colors and patterns).
All cats are girls and all dogs are boys, duh.
We named a female cat Dave before we knew she was female (we were bottle feeding her before we got her fixed. thought she was male. the vet corrected us, but she came when we called Dave down the hall so we weren't changing her name). So from then on Dave was male when he was bad, female when she was good, and enby when they were neither.
I went to school with a girl named Dayv (pronounced Dave). She went by Dayve (pronounced Davey).
I've had a male cat and a female dog for the past 16 years and my dad still calls the dog he and the cat she 🙄.
Things that feel bigoted but aren't 😅
I'm wondering what ratio of "gendered" languages uses the feminine genus for cats as opposed to dogs, as in "die Katze/der Hund".
Exactly! Is cats are girls and dogs are boys just a Germanic thing, or is it deeper?
I'm Czech and it's "ta kočka ♀/ten pes ♂" too. The terms "kocour" and "fena" also exist but exclusively mean tomcat and bitch, never the species. In rare cases, the species name, the male animal and female animal are all different, but the species is still gendered because of grammar:
🐎 kůň (♂): hřebec ♂, klisna ♀
🐓 kur (♂): kohout ♂, slepice ♀
🐝 včela (♀): trubec ♂, dělnice ♀
🐖 prase (🇳): vepř ♂, bachyně ♀
Baby animals use the neutrum genus: ~🐈~ kotě, ~🐕~ štěně, ~🐎~ hříbě, ~🐤~ kuře, ~🐖~ sele
Many romance languages have both; for instance, in Catalan “gos” / “gossa”, “gat” / “gata”, in Spanish, “perro” / “perra”, “gato” / “gata”, or in French “chien” / “chienne”, “chat” / “chatte”.
See my other comment, the one with the emoji: yes, words like "tomcat" and "bitch" exist, but which is used for the species?
In general the default for cats and dogs is the male form, though it can be ambiguous between male and don't know / don't care.
For instance if you saw a random unidentified cat you could say you saw “un gat / gato / chat”, and it would be impossible to tell whether you were referring to a male cat or a cat of unknown gender (while if you used the female form it'd be unambiguous).
Romance languages really could use a neutral form, but “gat@”, “gat*”, or “gatx” just don't work when you try to figure out how to say them out loud, and using the female form for neutral just moves the problem to the other side.
But we can make it more complicated in Germany:
"Kater" refers to male cats
"Katze" refers to female cats as well as the neutral term for the animal.
:)
All female cats are cats and all male cats are hangovers
Hihi
Most would assume my orange cat os a boy but it's a girl
I have a female orange as well. She has floating patellas and walks funky. Does yours have something similar?
not really, she does runs funny but there is no physical problem she is just chaotic and a bit dumb lol
It feels like in german that hats are mostly referred to as female ("she is a cutie") until proven otherwise (maybe) because the word for the species "Katze" is also the word for female cats "Katze" while males have the word "Kater"
Also a lot of cats are "Katzen" and never "Katers"
There's a cat-in-the-hat joke in here somewhere, I'm just not finding it.
Germans gender hats? But I'm masculine and love wearing bunny ears! /s
The German language has three forms of the word "the" - the two genders, and neutral. As a kid living in Germany for a while, this gave me fits - things like doors, tables, windows, etc. are gendered, but I'll be damned if I could ever figure out any pattern to predict which would get which gender (or neutral).
The pattern is "what souds good"
Die Tür -> sounds good
Das Boot -> souds good
Die Boot -> souds bad
"Sounds good" in language is usually something you're used to hearing, so it "sounds good" because you've already heard it that way & are used to it. Doesn't help one lick for those not already deeply immersed in hearing the language routinely.
This is why I love Lemmy. Linguistics from a cat post!
The problem is that what sounds good in German doesn't necessarily sound good in other gendered languages (romance languages, for instance), so if you know both you need to know multiple mutually incompatible lists of arbitrarily gendered words.
As a French speaker, I stg your genders for LE sun and LA moon don't make a lick of sense, and sound really wrong.
DER Sonne is obviously a guy. Goes to the gym every day, lifts weights, big muscles, maybe a bandana. Picture a ladies' man from 1985 in a beach town, and that's him.
And DIE Mund is the protectress of women.
“Der Tür” sounds awful, you make a lot of sense
i invested like 2 minutes trying to make it perfect and then *a typo*
This is why Dutch is superior.
Poes.
/jk
I call cats "it" because it sounds more cuterstersterster
All cats are 'baby' unless I'm told otherwise!
Do you want a medal for being a champion cat sexer?
I'll take one. I'll sex those cats up
Klinefelter cats can have the same fur patterns while phenotypical presenting as male. Very unlikely though.
Tortoiseshell and calico? Not sure of any others
About 80% of orange cats are male; not as clear as one in three thousand for calicos, but stilll.
Yes, plus the tabby variants of those (i.e. tabby with orange splotches, tabby-and-white with orange splotches).
Side point, but there's male three colour cats. Cats can be chromosomally intersex, just like humans. My family used to have a male calico. They usually have XXY chromosomes.
This is a proper shower thought
You know just enough to be dangerous
Gender is a social construct...
I always assume a cat is a 'she' until it proves otherwise.