Expert: Norman Auspitz - 6/3/2009

Question
How do you tell the difference between a male and female cat? Both spayed,
unspayed, and neutered, unneutered. Thanks!

Answer
Dylan,

The easy answer for whole cats is males have external gonads and females do not. For very young kittens, if you look under the tail, the male parts look like a colon ":", where the top dot is anus and the bottom dot is the penile sheath.  For females, they look like an upside down exclamation point "!", there the top dot is the anus and the bottom slit is the entrance to the vagina.

Often it is very difficult to tell whether a female has been spayed or not.  I have known of vets who shaved the belly, did not notice a scar and discovered the cat had already been spayed. A couple of things may be helpful in this determination.  The vet could do a hormone test and usually tell if a cat is spayed or not by hormone levels.  If the cat comes into season, she is, generally, not spayed. However, in spaying, if the vet did not get the entire uterus and left any tissue behind, those pesky female hormones will still be excreted and a "spayed" female could still come into season!!!!!

Males are easy, they either have external gonads or they do not, if neutered, but, there is a however to this. In some cases, if the male only had one testicle descended or neither testicle descended, the vet may not be able to find the undescended testicle(s) and even though there appear to be no external gonads, the male may behave like a whole cat due to male hormone levels. Besides that on a neutered male, you can tell where the testicles would have been and when you look under the tail of a female vs. a whole or neutered male, it becomes more obvious.

Of course, if all else fails, you can get a PCR test done and use the DNA to tell male from female.  Even this is not foolproof as one can get genetic anomalies.

So, on the surface, what should have been a short easy answer to a really great question is full of so many ifs, ands, and buts, the answer turns out to be relatively easy most of the time for differentiating between males and females and neutered males vs. whole males, but not so easy between spayed females and whole females.

I really hope this is helpful and not as confusing as it sometimes can be.  Please let me know if you have any follow up questions.

Best regards... Norm.