Viewer Gender Confusion / Western Animation

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Viewer Gender Confusion in Western Animation.

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• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: Thanks to a case of "Blind Idiot" Translation, Tails was referred to as a female and given a feminine voice in the Latin American Spanish dub, causing many viewers and Sonic fans there to think he was a girl. It also doesn’t help that most of his voice actors are female.
• Adventure Time:
  • Quite a few first-time viewers mistook Lumpy Space Princess for a male because of her manly voice.
  • BMO gets this the worst. The character has been considered male and female depending on the episode, but Word of God confirms that BMO is genderfluid.
  • Shelby can easily be mistaken for female because he has a gender-neutral name, a high-pitched voice, a gender-neutral design (being simply an earthworm with a face), and is pink.
• The Amazing World of Gumball is full of these:
  • The most prominent male example is Leslie. Due to being a pink flower with a high-pitched voice and a gender neutral name, it's not hard to mistake him for a girl. It doesn't help that in the episode "The Pressure" he was in the treehouse with the other girls. This might be a reference to the fact that plants have both male and female reproductive organs.
  • Alan and even Darwin himself can be mistaken for girls due to their high-pitched voices, eyelashes, and rather feminine personalities.
  • Some girls lack feminine characteristics like eyelashes and can easily be mistaken for boys, especially when they are near one of the feminine-looking boys. The most prominent examples are Tina and Jamie, due to being tough bullies with deep voices and masculine appearances.
  • The Coach, Jamie's mother, looks and sounds so manly that even Gumball and Darwin are shocked when they find out she's a woman.
• Mindy from Animaniacs was, despite her name, often assumed to be a boy when the series was new, because of her short hair and gender-neutral overalls. It's possible that the creators eventually caught on to this, as one episode broke the trend of Limited Wardrobe by putting Mindy in a dress. Later still, during a short which featured Elmyra Duff, Mindy was constantly referred to as a "cute little girl" by Elmyra, almost as if to hammer it into the heads of the viewers.
• Furlecia of Arlo the Alligator Boy and I ♡ Arlo is a flamboyant pink furball with humanoid limbs who's obviously female, but has a rather masculine-sounding voice and visible mustache. It even helps that she's voiced by a genderqueer male actor.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender: Smellerbee was assumed to be male during her debut episode. However, since she was given a minor role, had an ambiguous voice actor (Nika Futterman, to be exact), hadn't hit puberty yet and was in a team of Lost Boys-style Freedom Fighters, you can't really blame the fans. It wasn't until Season 2 that more fans realized she was female. Lampshaded, as Iroh refers to her as a "young man" when they meet, making her rather upset. Additionally, her French voice actor is a dude.
• The early 1990s animated Babar TV series featured a character called Pompadour, dressed in light orange, very effete and fussy, with a high-pitched voice and a tiny little bit of Ho Yay with Cornelius.
• In Ben 10, Ripjaws the male Pisciss Volann, is consistently mistaken for an actual mermaid throughout the series.
  • In Ben 10: Omniverse, Pesky Dust the male Nemuina, is often mistaken for female.
  • Another case of am ambiguous voice actor: Cooper from Ben 10. He had neck-length blonde hair and big blue eyes. At least in its Time Skipped sequel, Ben 10: Alien Force, Cooper got himself a haircut and a new voice actor. By the way, Cooper and Ben were voiced by a woman in the original.
• Blue's Clues:
  • The title character, Blue, is female, though many viewers believe her to be male. This is likely due in large part to the color blue being traditionally associated with boys. However, anyone who watches the show long enough will eventually learn Blue's gender, thanks to phrasing such as, "I'm looking for my puppy, Blue. Have you seen her?"
  • Due to the fact Blue is female, a lot of people thought (and still think) the series was inverting Pink Girl, Blue Boy gender roles. Thus, Magenta is commonly thought to be male. She's not.
  • Green Puppy has a deep voice and has been called male once but is canonically female.
  • Periwinkle, the purple cat, is male. So the show didn't invert Pink Girl, Blue Boy, but did invert Female Feline, Male Mutt.
  • Aside from Mr. Salt and Mrs. Pepper, you pretty much have to wait for pronouns to be spoken about any other object character. For instance, Shovel is male and Pail is female, but this is not obvious at all.
• Bluey and her sister Bingo. Since they are voiced by young children, their voices are very androgynous and their lack of eyelashes leads to viewers thinking they're boys, especially since Bluey looks like her father and Bingo is usually a boy's name.
  • The same goes for their cousins Muffin and Socks.
  • On the flip side, Bluey's friend Mackenzie is sometimes mistaken for a girl due to his feminine-sounding name.
  • Lampshaded in the "Double Babysitter" episode; when Bluey's Uncle Rad arrives to watch the girls, he (possibly jokingly) refers to Bluey as a boy and she corrects him.
• One thing about Bob's Burgers that puts some people off is the use of male voice actors for female leads Linda (wife/mother) and Tina (13-year-old daughter). In the original pilot, Tina actually WAS male, and named Daniel, with Dan Mintz using pretty much the same voice as he does for Tina.
• There are people who have originally thought Riley from The Boondocks was a tomboyish girl. What with his long hair, Gender-Blender Name, and voice (it's supposed to sound like a little boy but is somewhat feminine).
• Care Bears:
  • Some people still refuse to acknowledge that, despite being dubbed by a woman, Grumpy Bear is actually male. Latter installments of the franchise have him voiced by males, and usually somewhat deep-voiced ones also, so there's no mistaking his gender. More problematic are certain characters that flipped genders from one incarnation of the franchise to another, such as Funshine Bear.
  • Lotsa Heart Elephant, Cozy Heart Penguin, and Swift Heart Rabbit are this mainly due to the fact they're often presented as male or female depending on the media or episode. In The Care Bears: Adventure in Wonderland, Swift Heart Rabbit's uncle, Wonderland's White Rabbit, mentions (in passing) that Swift Heart is female. Many people, especially the Nostalgia Critic, were briefly shocked by this. Swift Heart's gender is the source of fan confusion, similar to Flaky from another cute-looking animal series. She's been referred to as male and female but the general consensus is she's a girl.
• Chowder:
  • Some people confuse Chowder for a girl since he wears a purple and pink shirt and is touchy-feely at times. The fact that his voice actor was pre-pubescent at the beginning of the series definitely doesn't help (his voice has dropped in later episodes, though).
  • Many people mistake Ceviche for a girl because he has long purple hair and wears a pinkish-purple leotard.
• In the Color Classics cartoon “Christmas Comes But Once A Year” we don’t really know if some of the children at the orphanage besides the bald baby are boys, since besides him they all look alike, the same girlish design with different hair colors, but it can be assumed that given the time period the ones with the pop gun and football are male, since it would be less likely that girls would want to play with those toys.
• Code Lyoko:
  • This is sometimes done by the production staff themselves. There are a lot of male background characters with effeminate names or appearances, which causes some confusion, such as boys standing in girls' bathroom lines. Emmanuel Maillard, a boy cursed with long hair, a gender-neutral(ish) name, and a necklace, has a girl's voice in one of his two speaking appearances. (His name was "Mike" in the other one.)
  • On the viewers' side of things, Odd's gender-neutral hair, taste for the color purple, and exitable, flamboyant nature have lead many to mistake him for a flat-chested girl. His masculine voice helps a bit (though probably not in the French version, where his voice is higher than most people over the age of eight), as does the fact that he's dated every girl in the school.
• Craig of the Creek:
  • Handlebarb, Leader of the Ten-Speeds has gender-neutral clothing, short chin-length bob, and a androgynous voice, which probably confuses Viewers thinking she's a he. It wasn`t until one episode when someone refer to him as `Miss Handlebarb`.
  • Yustice of The Ninja Kids's design makes it easy to assume that she's a boy.
  • Turner, the Bring out your Beast Card Game champion can be mistaken for a boy too.
• Dora the Explorer:
  • Dora in the early days. She lacked a lot of the Tertiary Sexual Characteristics associated with girls and had a rather gender-neutral haircut. Starting in the mid 2000s this began being averted more, as she frequently appears in feminine attire.
  • A more straightforward example is Backpack. Her voice isn't feminine enough, she lacks any Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, and her coloring (light purple) is seen as a neutral color. Eventually she was given a Girliness Upgrade in the sequel series.
• In The Dragon Prince, quite a few viewers believed that the Elfeminate Aaravos was a woman, as a few episodes pass before he finally speaks.^note Well, technically we hear him narrate the first episode, but he's not formally introduced until season two. Once he does, though, his very deep voice makes it clear that he's male.
• Ed, Edd n Eddy:
  • Although it's been established that Edd (better known as "Double D") is in fact a boy, it's not hard for some people to mistake him for a girl—his black hat resembles long hair, he has a higher-pitched voice compared to most of the other male characters, and he's somewhat effeminate compared to most of the other male characters. Not helping matters is how often Edd cross-dresses for the sake of a scam - pretending to be a mermaid to fool Jimmy, a fishmonger's wife to fool Rolf and even dressing up as Nazz when they sneak into Jimmy's birthday party. This also happens in-universe when Eddy's Brother refers to Edd as Eddy's girlfriend.
  • Similarly, it's not uncommon to think Jimmy is a girl, given he is very delicate, loves playing with dolls, bakes, and speaks in a squeaky, high-pitched voice that's actually higher than Nazz and Sarah's.
  • And on the flipside, though they're referred to collectively as 'the Kanker Sisters', it's easy to mistake Lee Kanker for a boy considering that she has a unisex name that has a masculine spelling, personality and voice. She even has a Lantern Jaw of Justice that is usually a design feature for male characters, notably Kevin, Rolf and Eddy's Bro.
• Pickle the bunny from Endangered Species is female, but has no physical traits indicating this.
• Poof from The Fairly OddParents!, to the point where even his parents weren't sure if it was a boy or a girl when he was first born. Turned out Poof was a boy (Timmy deciphered this because "boys love water squirters"). It doesn't help that prior to the episode a game on the Nickelodeon site stated that Poof was a girl.
• Franklin:
  • The character of Snail in the children's cartoon series certainly caused a lot of confusion for viewers. The character was a soft lavender color and had a voice that sounded female causing people to think Snail was a girl. (Actually, it didn't just sound female — it was female. Snail was voiced by Kristen Bone, who also did Maggie from Maggie and the Ferocious Beast.) However, Snail is a boy. OK, technically snails are hermaphrodites... but since this is a kid's show...
  • Then there's Rabbit. Another character people tended to think was female, but was really male.
  • On the other side of the coin, there's Badger. Hmm... badgers are usually tough, fierce, and rather rowdy by nature... traits stereotypically associated with males. So, Badger must be a male, right? Wrong. Badger is a girl.
  • Likewise, Skunk is a girl but people have mistaken her for a guy.
• Garfield: Nermal is a male kitten, despite him being given an obviously feminine voice in the cartoon. This might have been just to highlight Nermal's obnoxious cuteness before the mistake was caught, and wouldn't be really relevant except Nermal is still referred to as "he" in the show. It's just as bad in the comic, where he has long, thick eyelashes but is referred to as "he", to the point where several translations refer to him as female. They've seemed to fix this error in the most recent 3D movies by giving him a male voice actor (Jason Marsden) which makes him sound like a boy in the beginning stages of puberty. This is also averted in the first live action movie, where Nermal is clearly an adult with a very boyish voice. The Spanish dubs of the cartoon for Latin America actually went and decided to say Nermal was a girl, except for at least one episode.
• Noodle from Gorillaz was often mistaken for a boy during Phase 1, but from Phase 2 onwards has definitely gotten more feminine. Bishōnen 2D sometimes gets the reverse, being mistaken as a woman by viewers from time to time.
• Some first-time viewers of Grojband may mistake Laney to be a boy due to her Boyish Short Hair and tomboy personality. Not helping matters is that Laney has this problem in-universe as well.
• Some newcomers to Handy Manny can mistake Dusty for a boy due to the fact that she doesn't have eyelashes unlike Squeeze.
• Princess from Harvey Beaks is sometimes mistaken for a male because of her manly voice.
• Infinity Train's third season introduces Tuba, a female gorilla drawn without any Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. Her voice could be easily mistaken for a man's despite having a female VA.
• Zero from I.N.K. Invisible Network of Kids. She's a tomboy, she has a boyish voice and her eyelashes look more like face paint à la A Clockwork Orange.
• A large number of KaBlam! fans were shocked when they realized that June was female (she's got tomboy written all over her), despite her name.
• Kaeloo:
  • It gets this so often that her gender has become divisive. The fact that she is voiced by a man in every language really doesn't help with this. There's in-show evidence going both ways, but Word of God confirms her to be female (at the moment), and have even made it the center of focus of a few episodes. "She" has eventually been confirmed to be a Hermaphrodite, or a sequential hermaphrodite.
  • Translator Gender Confusion has also happened. In the English dub, she was male for around 10 episodes before the translators noticed something was a''miss''. Since then, she's been consistently referred to with the correct pronouns. However, considering the recent Gender Reveal, this could be accurate.
  • Some viewers have initially mistaken Stumpy for a girl due to his petite frame, high-pitched voice, jumpy nature and tendency to dress in drag. This also happens with Quack-Quack of all characters at times, likely because of his sheer non-information and the fact that he might look to some people as if he's wearing purple eyeshadow.
• Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts: Wolf is confused for a boy by many a viewer. It doesn't help that her young age and voice don't really give any indication.
• Snooky Wookums the kitten from Krypto the Superdog is said to be male but, much like Nermal, has an obviously feminine voice and long eyelashes. To make it more confusing, in the episode where the dogs are turned into puppies, they call Snooky "nanny"; then later when Mechanikat turns into a kitten, he calls "him" "Poppa".
• Mitzi, the monkey, from Little Bear was female. This series is set pre-feminist revolution so it's justified; you wouldn't expect a girl to be so tomboyish in this setting, especially since the other girls are so feminine. Also, her name is rather gender vague and she does act like the boys.
• Littlest Pet Shop (2012):
  • Sweet Cheeks, the sugar glider from "Pawlm Reading". Many viewers were led to assume he was female for most of the episode, due to his eyelashes and Shrinking Violet personality.
  • Meow-Meow, the kitten from "Room Enough". With his high-pitched voice and long eyelashes, one would most likely mistake him for a female if not for Mrs. Twombly confirming he was a male at the very beginning.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Tweety Bird is actually male, but the high-pitched voice as well as the eyelashes often lead viewers to think that the character is female, especially in foreign dubs where he is often voiced by a woman. In the original versions of the shorts as well as the Hungarian and Hebrew dubs of The Looney Tunes Show, his voice was provided by men. His original voice actor was Mel Blanc, with his voice sped-up in post-production to achieve the high pitch. Another source of confusion might be the title of the 1952 short Ain't She Tweet. This has not been helped by Warner Bros. selling a line of Tweety Bird clothing for girls that depict him wearing bows and flowers in his head feathers. His creator, Bob Clampett, explained that Tweety was a boy during an interview when the host referred to the latter as a girl. According to Clampett, Tweety has eyelashes and a high-pitched voice because he is supposed to be a baby bird. This is lampshaded in an episode of The Sylvester and Tweety Mysteries as well as an Around the World in 80 Days parody movie. In the former, when Tweety has to use the bathroom, he flies towards the female restroom before entering the male one and says, "I bet you all thought I was a girl, didn't you?". In the latter, Tweety comes out of a male (bird) restroom and says "See? I am a boy." The Looney Tunes Show also lampshades this confusion, where Sylvester is unsure if Tweety is a boy or girl, until someone whispers it to him. We don't hear it, but Sylvester's response is "Huh, I was wrong." In a later episode, Sylvester refers to Tweety with male-specific pronouns.
  • The Road Runner is widely assumed to be female, too, but is intended to be male. This is implied with some of Wile E.'s traps, which sometimes use female Roadrunner decoys.
  • Going by appearance alone, it wouldn't be hard to mistake Marvin the Martian as female, what with his skirt and polite mannerisms. He's male, though, as his name^note That is, once he had a name; he was originally just called "The Martian". and voice will clarify.
    • Also, the short "Another Froggy Evening" gave him eyelashes. And he crossdresses in some later cartoons like Duck Dodgers.
• In The Loud House, Lana's lizard Izzy is male, but has been mistaken for female due to his gender-neutral name.
• The title character of Maisy, an anthropomorphic mouse. She's a girl, but only speaks in a childlike gender-neutral babble and is often seen wearing clothes in colors that wouldn't be out-of-place on a boy, without any ribbons or other accessories that would peg her as a girl.
• Adorabat from Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart is a girl, but due to being colored blue and lacking eyelashes, viewers commonly mistake her for a boy.
• The Mr. Men Show: Miss Scary looks and sounds somewhat like a Mr. Man.
• ¡Mucha Lucha! has a few of these, though Snow Pea stands out. Snow Pea is a young, cute, and feminine character who wears a full-body costume. It's hard to tell whether Snow Pea is a cute little boy or a little girl. It doesn't help that all Snow Pea ever says is "Snow Pea". It has been hinted that Snow Pea is male, as he danced with a Distaff Counterpart once. If it helps, in the Spanish version he is called "Frijolito" wich actually means "snow pea", but in Spanish nouns are gender locked and frijolito is a male noun.
• In early episodes of the My Little Pony 'n Friends and in the My Little Pony TV Specials it was never explicitly stated that Dream Valley was the ultimate Lady Land. Therefore, some fans assumed any deep-voiced Pony was male. Applejack and Skydancer tend to suffer this kind of confusion the most. Even decades later some people think Applejack is a stallion, though her FIM counterpart has helped the issue. This extena to that in some foreign dubs, that the more tomboyish ponies got rewritten as males.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Whoever wrote the episode preview descriptions for the program confused Rarity (of all ponies!) and Rainbow Dash for males in two separate instances.
  • Background pony Caramel's gender is a mystery even to the animators apparently, since his/her design has been seen on a male and a female pony.
  • Little Red◊, a background foal appearing in "Twilight Time". Even the show creators don't know what gender he/she is.
  • Many viewers have initially mistaken the tomboyish Rainbow Dash as a boy. This also happened with Scootaloo and Applejack.
  • There's also a colt named Lickety-Split who has eyelashes, which are only displayed on the mares and fillies. This might have to do with the fact that Lickety-Split had been a filly in previous generations.
  • In "It Ain't Easy Being Breezies", pretty much all of the eponymous breezies look and sound very feminine. Including Seabreeze, who's male and looks like this. Note that he is voiced by the (very male) Brian Drummond... not that it's easy to tell as the pitch was cranked way up.
  • Before Season 8 premiere "School Daze", the fans were wondering about the gender of Smolder the Dragon. The episode itself hardly immediately dispelled those doubts, as her Secondary Sexual Characteristics are very slight and she acts very tomboyish (which is natural for dragons). Sure, she's voiced by Shannon Chan-Kent, but it isn't any rare for young boys to have female voice actors. A tweet from Jim Miller finally confirmed that she is in fact female.
  • Hyper Sonic◊ is voiced by Richard Ian Cox and was confirmed a colt◊.
  • Lil' Cheese, Pinkie and Cheese's son in the finale, is implied to be a boy according to the script. However, he has eyelashes and a generally filly-like design.
• Not Quite Narwhal's core cast was intentionally designed to look as androgynous as possible; the creators felt profoundly accomplished when test audiences asked them which gender a character was. To give some examples: Cruz is a pink male dolphin, Scallop has a horn despite female narwhals rarely having them, Ollie is a boy with long hair and a ponytail, and Juniper was switched from a boy to a girl during production without changing the character's appearance at all.
• Numberblocks:
  • One is sometimes mistaken for a boy, but is actually a girl.
  • Eleven is thought to be male for a while, but her debut episode made it clear that she's female as One said "she shoots, she scores!"
• For viewers that never read the book which Olive, the Other Reindeer is based on, Olive is female, but was mistaken for a boy due to her voice and has no physical traits.
• OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes:
  • Dendy has a very androgynous appearance and style of dress, and was not referred to by any gendered pronouns in her intro episode. Many fans weren't sure what her gender was until the production notes posted along the episodes confirmed that she's a girl.
  • At first glance, Potato (the little rabbit) could easily be mistaken for a boy.
  • Vormulax was also a case of this until "Plazalympics", when Enid referred to her as a her.
  • Rippy Roo is female, as per Word of God, but you wouldn't guess by watching the episodes she appears in alone, she has a pouch, like a female kangaroo, but it could be easily seen as a case of Animal Gender-Bender by most viewers.
• The Owl from The Owl & Co is supposed to be female, but aside from being pink she has no physical traits that make this clear.
• The Owl House:
  • Luz is very easy to mistake for a boy thanks to having Boyish Short Hair, a somewhat androgynous-sounding voice, beak-like upper lip and always wears a hoodie with shorts.
  • The non-binary Raine Whispers is sometimes mistaken for a man due to their masculine voice and hairstyle, though a flashback episode shows their younger self with a more feminine voice and appearance.
  • Before his gender was revealed, many fans mistook Eberwolf to be a female.
• Anyone who watched PB&J Otter when it was on the air will remember the baby, but might not immediately remember her gender. Butter is a girl, though she's a baby and looks more like her brother than her sister, so it's very easy to mistake her for a boy. In the wedding episode, she wears a pink flower girl outfit like Jelly. The theme song also lists the family as "father, mother, sisters, and brother" but you have to listen closely to hear the plural sound. A few episodes did refer to Butter with female pronouns, but usually they just called her by name.
• In some Peanuts specials, Peppermint Patty, for those unfamiliar with the strip, suffers this due to her tomboyish appearance and being voiced by a boy.
• Peepoodo & the Super Fuck Friends has a special case with Evelyn. In "Dr. Peepoodo", she makes her coming out as a trans woman, and while she has eyelashes and wears female clothes to have a feminine appearance, she still has male genitals since she didn’t get a sex change operation yet and have a masculine voice as she is still voiced by a man in both dubs. Because of this, viewers how don't know Evelyn's transexuality can believe that she is a man in drag.
• Pepper Ann:
  • Moose (Margaret Rose). She's a girl, just very unfeminine. Even characters on the show have mistaken her for a boy due to her deep voice, refusal to wear dresses, and playing sports that are more commonly associated with boys like skateboarding, hockey, football, soccer, and softball. Also, Moose seems rather gender-neutral when it comes to names; anyway. And in the Mexican Spanish dub, Moose was voiced by a boy!
  • You'd be surprised at how many viewers thought the title character was a boy.
  • Some viewers also thought Milo was a girl, thanks to his very sensitive personality and long blue hair.
• The Proud Family: Some viewers mistook BeBe for a girl (He has a thick afro and "Bebe" is usually a girl's name) up until "Twins to Tweens", where he and CeCe are magically turned into teens.
• A parent once wrote on the comments of the blog for Pocoyo that they were having a debate with their child over Sleepy Bird's Gender. The argument for Sleepy Bird being female is that she gives birth to a Baby Sleepy Bird in one episode, but the child argued that Sleepy Bird looks like a boy.
• Rainbow Brite:
  • Starlite gets a lot of this due to his rainbow colour scheme and and the fact that his voice sounds like that of an old woman's.
  • Twink is a cute Cartoon Creature with a squeaky voice. He is often mistaken for a girl.
• Julian from Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja. He's male, but pretty androgynous, so it's fairly easy to misinterpret him as female.
• There's a minor character in Recess whose name is eventually revealed to be the gender-neutral Tracy, and the gender is completely up in the air. Despite having bobbed hair, Tracy also has a very masculine body and wears boys' clothes. And there's also the fact that Tracy has had different voice actors. It's Tracy who suggests that Spinelli was out getting more rocks to hit Randal with and it's clearly a male voice. In another episode where Gretchen tries to fail a test, Tracy encourages her and this time it's a female voice. In the "Picture Day" episode, the character is seen wearing a dress, so Tracy must be a girl.
• Rocky of Rocky and Bullwinkle fame is identified as a male squirrel, but there is nothing masculine about him whatsoever. June Foray's voice for the character is distinctively female. To muddy the waters even further, in the Made-for-TV Movie Boris and Natasha, Rocky was made human... and became a woman.
• Sadie Sparks: Gilbert can easily be confused for a female, at least until you hear his voice.
• Shaun the Sheep: Due to the show's lack of dialogue and the fact that the biggest sheep has a deep bleat, some viewers think she's a ram. She's actually a ewe, and her name is Shirley. In fact, the entire flock consists of ewes, except Shaun, Timmy, Nuts, and Timmy's unseen father, yet some viewers don't realise this.
• Sheep in the Big City featured a character called the Plot Device, a robot whose purpose was to move the plot forward by giving information and suggestions to the top secret military organization targeting Sheep. The Plot Device lacks any gender-identifying characteristics, but is said to be female in "Party of the Shear".
• Steven Universe:
  • Many assumed Ruby was a boy because she is rather tomboyish and is an Official Couple with the more feminine Sapphire. Some people couldn't believe there would be a bona fide same-sex romance in a children's show, but Ruby is indeed a Butch Lesbian (of the discount variety due to Gems having No Biological Sex.)
  • Sadie's mother was thought to be her older brother or father until confirmed otherwise.
  • Pearl, especially in her earlier pilot design, often gets mistaken for a boy.
  • Jasper is very easy to confuse for a male; she's named after a stone that's also a masculine name, has a very raspy voice, is a giant, muscular war veteran with tiger stripes and was by far the most aggressive, cruel character at the time of her introduction.
  • This seems to be a common trend among all Yellow Diamond's servants. Though some of them possess reasonably feminine voices, all of them sport very gender neutral to rather masculine designs. Peridot only avoids confusion because she has a slight figure and a very high-pitched voice.
  • Though her voice is fairly womanly, Bismuth looks even more masculine than Jasper, being very broad chested and muscular. Her clothes (a blacksmith apron over her bare chest) don't exactly help. It's probably because of this that her episode has two subtle references to full Gems being a One-Gender Race.^note "There's a gem in there." "What does she look like?" and "Usually when I meet a new Gem, she tries to kill me."
  • Stevonnie and Smoky Quartz are fusions of Steven with Connie and Amethyst, respectively, which makes them both non-binary and referred to with they/them pronouns. It's still very common for viewers to call them she/her (especially Stevonnie.)
• Summer Camp Island:
  • Pajamas is a living pajama shirt with Blush Stickers and an androgynous little kid voice. It isn't until the fifth episode that Oscar refers to Pajamas with pronouns. Thus, many fans didn't know Pajamas wasn't a girl (or at least genderless).
  • Hedgehog is a girl but this isn't readily noticeable due to her Tomboyish Voice, Gender-Blender Name, and androgynous appearance. She wears a skirt but it isn't always visible on-screen.
• Superjail!:
  • While Alice is confirmed by the creators to be a woman, specifically a transgender woman, there were fans confused and that thought she was instead transitioning from being female to male, that she was a male drag queen, or that she was simply a woman abusing steroids (or that her bulge was just a gag). Her origin in season 2 cleared up the matter, although it didn't help things for some of the fanbase.
    • Bruce, in contrast, didn't get as much debate as Alice, although there still was occasional confusion over whether he was meant to be a transgender man or a butch lesbian.
  • Although The Twins have always been referred to as men in the series (Alice's confusion over them aside), there were fans that had also mistaken them for women up until their shirtless scene in "Superbar". There are occasionally those that try to suggest that one of the two could be a woman, even though both refer to each other as "Brother" and have both been referred to as "boys" and "sons". A commentary track on the season 2 DVD had a guest who was even confused, asking the creators if the characters were meant to be two "ugly girls".
  • A one-shot character named "Peepers" in season 2 was meant to be a teenage boy, but due to being voiced by a woman, wound up having fans wonder if he was instead a teenage girl.
• Rorek, from Teen Titans (not the dragon) was commonly assumed to be a girl due to the scarf over his face.
• Tiny Toon Adventures: God knows how many people have thought that Little Sneezer was female. Given the Tertiary Sexual Characteristics (long eyelashes and high-pitched voice, same characteristics as Tweety mentioned above) deployed onto him, it's understandable.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • Toby's cowcatchers resemble a skirt.
  • And Percy has a rather high-pitched voice.
  • Rusty looked pretty androgynous when he first appeared, and they never said his gender (he was a "he" in the books). Then fans had a fit when the new writers called him a "she" in one episode. Writer Gender Confusion, anyone? Throw No Biological Sex (being locomotives, they shouldn't technically have either^note Although a Viz parody completely subverted this) into the mix and you can take this anywhere you please.
• Jerry from Tom and Jerry, is a male, but he has a cutesy appearance, girlish eyelashes, and (when not punishing Tom), has a very sweet and affectionate personality. In some episodes he crossdresses and roleplays girls, and appears to enjoy doing so, and in a few others he actually kisses Tom. He generally acts very feminine, much like an annoying little sister, so it's clear to see why many people assume Jerry is a girl. In the 1993 film, he is given a slightly high-pitched male voice. Some assume that he is gay, but he is shown to fall deeply for female mice in some episodes.
• The Tool Street Gang:
  • Fret and Nutley are supposed to be girls, but due to their lack of Tertiary Sexual Characteristics and the fact that the show’s naming scheme means none of the characters’ names have any sort of gender association it’s darned near impossible to tell that without hearing them speak.
  • Squirt has the opposite problem- he’s supposed to be male, but has a high-pitched and generally feminine-sounding voice that may cause some viewers to think he’s a girl.
• Strika◊ in Transformers: Animated caused a bit of this when her picture showed up, due to not conforming to the usual female mold. Beast Wars Airrazor had a similar problem, leading to She's a Man in Japan.
  • Strika actually caused surprisingly little of this... Because her Beast Machines counterpart looked pretty much the same, and was also female, which meant that the gender confusion had already been gotten out of the way.
  • Transformers: Prime: Soundwave has a few moments of this in his original appearance. He doesn't speak, simply repeats messages he's picked up—and the first he repeated was Arcee's, using Arcee's voice overlaid with his own computerized tones. This led some people to think he was female until he repeated another person's message.
  • Of course, how exactly gender identity and sexual dimorphism would even apply to Cybertronians in the first place is a question the cartoons tend to avoid bringing up. In some continuities they were outright genderless until they made first contact with humanity, and someone decided to introduce genders to Autobot society artificially just to see what would happen.
• Varokaa heikkoa jäätä: Officially, the kid who saves the bear is a boy named Heikki, but many viewers mistake him for a girl. It doesn't help at all that both the male and female pronouns in the Finnish language (which the show was produced in) are exactly the same – "hän".
• Dr. Girlfriend in The Venture Bros., of course. Looks like a sexied-up Jackie Kennedy, talks like a stevedore. Plenty of in-house confusion - Pete White and Billy Quizboy ponder sex-change surgery at work, Brock suspects she's a guy, she tells a girl in a public restroom that she does belong there; she just smokes a lot.
• The Weekenders: It took wearing a dress to impress a guy for many viewers to realize tomboy Lor was a girl. It doesn't help that Lor and Tino look quite similar to each other.
• One of the most oddly persistent examples is the German-Austrian-Japanese co-production Wickie und die starken Männer, known as Chiisana baikingu Bikke in Japan. Many, if not most, of the German-language viewers would swear that the title character is a little girl. This is slightly jarring, as he is regularly referred to as male — and the captain's son. There was even a scene where he was shown skinny-dipping, complete with a cutesy hint of male genitals. However, clothed, he certainly looks quite girlish. The impression is not only supported by the female voice actor, but also by a confusing bit in the title theme: one of the lines urges the character "Wickie, zieh fest die Segel an" ("Wicky, pull the sails tightly"). This was commonly misheard as "Wicky, sie fässt die Segel an" ("Wickie, she grabs the sails"). The English dub was even worse with this, using the title Vicky the Viking. The English dub of the CG reboot attempted to avoid this by using the title Vic the Viking, but characters still call the title character Vicky.
• Winnie the Pooh:
  • Piglet: He is dressed in pink, has a squeaky voice (in some dubs, he's voiced by a woman), and has a bashful personality.
  • Rabbit is just as bad, if not worse. His voice sounds like it could be a high-pitched man, or an old deep-voiced woman, and his fussiness and concern with order and cleanliness often make him seem all the more effeminate.
• Wonder Pets!: Some were surprised to learn that Linny, the guinea pig leader of the team, was female. Her outfit and her name are gender-neutral. There are episodes that make her gender obvious, such as the circus episode where she wears a ballet outfit, but some young viewers had either never saw these episodes or never caught on to it.
• Thanks to Grey DeLisle voicing Wubbzy in her brightest, most feminine voice, it's easy to forget that he's a boy. Although Wubbzy does not have eyelashes, which helps somewhat.
• Due to her young age in X-Men: Evolution, X-23 has an androgynous build. She can be mistaken for a long-haired boy. It isn't helped that she is a clone of Wolverine, though she is an Opposite Gender Clone.

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