Viewer Gender Confusion in Live-Action TV.
- Though it's quickly apparent if you watch the show, many people who hear of Angel assume it stars a woman, thanks to his Gender-Blender Name. (The show Dark Angel probably didn't help.) Lampshaded by Cordelia in Season 2 when she says "She could have been Angel because its kind of a girly name."
- Devs: Lyndon has a masculine name, a short haircut, and dresses in male fashion despite being female. If a viewer doesn't recognize the actress or notice the line referring to the character's age as 19, they can easily mistake Lyndon for an adolescent boy.
- Doctor Who:
- Alpha Centauri, in the classic series serial "The Curse of Peladon" (and "The Monster of Peladon", its sequel). A bit different, given it's not even vaguely human. The voice and body mannerisms are all very definitely feminine but nearly every character refers to it as either "he" or "him", despite the visual and aural indicators being for the opposite, and in actual fact, Alpha Centauri's race is genderless. (Word of God from the actress is that she was told to play the part as a Camp Gay civil servant.)
- Shortly after broadcast, This Very Wiki was calling Creet, the pre-teen kid in "Utopia" with shoulder-length hair, "the little girl". The character was played by John Bell, now better known as Bain in The Hobbit. According to the Doctor Who Wiki, Freema Agyeman made the same mistake
. This is the Long Hair Is Feminine bias at work.
- Coach Beiste from Glee. Many viewers believed, or still believe, she is played by a male actor. (She is, in fact, played by Dot Jones.)
- And then there's Kurt. The combination of his very high-pitched voice, Camp Gay mannerisms, elaborate outfits, and Pretty Boy, sometimes outright feminine appearance make it easy to mistake him for a girl at first, or at least a Bifauxnen. The actor's going through puberty helped to alleviate this... somewhat.
- Grace Polk from Joan of Arcadia, although it was addressed in the first episode when the character got mistaken for a "very rude boy" by another character.
- The Journey of Flower: Qian Mo is often mistaken for a woman, both by other characters and some of the audience. It's easy to see why.◊
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Double: Phillip actually passed for his sister Wakana for some time, mostly thanks to youth and crossdressing.
- Kamen Rider OOO: Morality is not the only thing doubtful about Ankh, who absolutely rocks a guyliner and weird hairdos in his human disguise. Being played by Ryosuke Miura doesn't make it any easier◊. It lasts only as long as he keeps his mouth shut, though.
- Kamen Rider Zi-O: Time Jacker Uhr is a short kid with feminine features. His messy, wavy hair doesn't help matters either, even less so when it's shoulder length later into the series. Any confusion is cleared up in second episode where he introduces himself with boku, a pronoun specific for young boys.
- Kamen Rider Zero-One: Naki speaks with feminine voice and appears to straddle the line between Bishōnen and Bifauxnen. Fans would usually default to she and characters avoid using pronouns alltogether. As it's later revealed, Naki has no gender.
- Perry in Kevin and Perry is played by a woman.
- Tripitaka from Monkey. Despite being male, he's physically played by a woman, and his English dub voice also a woman. Not many know that Tripitaka was meant to be male because of it.
- This happens with many monsters in Power Rangers, given the fact that there are rarely even Tertiary Sexual Characteristics to go by, all you have is the voice actor. For example, although Invenusable Flytrap is female, Soccadillo and Fighting Flea (played by the same voice actress) are male. Also, Wendee Lee has played villains of both genders, such as the male Stag Beetle and the female Witchblade.
- George from the British kids TV show Rainbow. Despite being pink with long eyelashes, having an effeminate voice and being the girly one of the group ("ooh, you are naughty!"), the character was male. The name should have been a clue, but the hugely popular kiddie book series The Famous Five did feature a girl called George, as does the Nancy Drew series...
- Raven has this with 3 of the contestants/warriors: Linmis from series 5, Lonas from series 6, and Kafsum from series 9 look feminine due to their hair styles. All 3 of them are actually male.
- Saturday Night Live: The "Pat" sketches star a person of indeterminate gender who causes confusion to everyone around them by not telling anyone what gender they are, causing much awkwardness (and hilarity).
- The title character of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was female — people tend to mistakenly refer to her as a "he" (then again, Skippy is nowadays primarily known through Popcultural Osmosis). Major clue that Skippy is a girl: she has a pouch.
- Data's cat Spot from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Spot was always referred to using male pronouns. Then Spot got pregnant. She later gave birth to a healthy litter — despite being de-evolved into a lizardlike creature at the moment (It Makes Sense in Context) (well, not really, but whatever).
- In "Pen Pals", O'Brien refers to Sarjenka (Nikki Cox) as "it". As one book on Star Trek: TNG noted: "If it was Nikki Cox after she grew up, he would have had no trouble telling her gender".
- Eleven from season one of Stranger Things, with her shaved head, prepubescent androgynous face, and odd gender neutral behavior could easily be mistaken for a boy and in universe several characters do think she is one.
- Uni Sax from Super Hero Christmas. Even in the illustrations that accompanied the credits, she could be either or. Then again, this is largely justified, considering her goal was to make everyone look and seem the same, which includes having nothing to define who or what you are.
- Some of the fully suited characters, mostly villains, in Super Sentai cause this when they are voiced by a female voice actor.
- Toripter from Engine Sentai Go-onger caused some confusion around the gender, because of having a female VA and sounding somewhere between a teenage boy and an older lady. It wasn't until later in the series that Toripter was revealed to be male, since he was affected by a Monster of the Week whose attacks only had effect on men. Furthermore, in the Ten Years After special, his voice has noticeably deepened, suggesting him to have been a prepubescent boy in the series; not to mention that he calls his partner Hiroto "Aniki", which is generally used for an older brother.
- To this day, fans still can't agree whether Luckyuro from Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger is a male or a female. On one hand, Luckyuro is voiced by a woman, with the voice actress even making a live action appearance on the show as a disguise Luckyuro temporarily donned with the help of a Monster of the Week. On the other hand, Luckyuro's suit does not posses any outward female characteristics and acts more like a little boy. To show how far this confusion goes: Some fansubs refer to the character as male, while the Super Sentai wiki insists the character is female.
- Izayoi Kyuuemon from Shuriken Sentai Ninninger was an offender of this trope as he also was voiced by a woman and seemed to look and act a bit feminine. However, the confusion cleared up when a flashback showed Kyuuemon's human form, which was clearly a teenage boy.
- Snoop from The Wire confused a lot of viewers. She dresses exactly like the men, hides her braided hair under baseball caps, makes suggestive comments about other women, has a very gravely voice, and generally makes her way as a stone killer in a man's world. The only time she wears feminine clothes in the entire series, she's also wearing a face-convering motorcycle helmet on a drive-by shooting. Marlo's first words to her are, "Your turn, girl", however, so the series is never trying to deliberately confuse the audience.
- X-Play had a segment called "Guy or Girl", where the viewers were asked if some androgynous video game characters were either male or female. It was later re-used as "Robot or Human".
- Multiple kids on You Can't Do That on Television, as The Nostalgia Critic discussed in his Nickcoms video:
- In the 1985 episodes and the very early 1986 episodes, Vanessa looks rather gender-ambiguous, having short to medium-length hair and typically dressing rather masculine, though she does wear earrings. By the time the second batch of '86 episodes premiered, her hair was noticeably longer and she had begun dressing more like a typical teenage girl.
- And Doug during the seasons when he had long hair. In the "Illness" episode (1986), he outright states that he got his hair cut because he was sick of people saying he looked too girlish, although his hair was still rather long at that time; midway through the 1986 season, he had his hair finally cut short, a move that got him (temporarily) fired from the show (since Roger Price didn't want the kids on the show making drastic changes in their appearances and thus tampering with their "trademark" look). In the 1985 season, his hair was actually longer than Vanessa's.
- 1986 cast member Jody Morris may have been mistaken for a girl by some viewers at first, due to his unisex first name as well as his own shoulder-length hair.
- Alanis Morissette also sported a boyish short haircut in her first two episodes ("Pop Music" and "Parties"), which was gone by her third episode ("TV Commercials").
