Viewer Gender Confusion

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Hey everyone, it's time to play "Guy or Girl?"

Snake: [Yoshi] lays eggs and throws them, right?... Then it must be female. Otacon: ... Actually, it's a "he". At least, that's what it says. —Snake's Codec conversation on Yoshi, Super Smash Bros. Brawl

"BOY or GIRL!?!?" —Weird Al Yankovic (repeatedly), Riff Trax of Jurassic Park

You have been watching this series for a while, be it since childhood or since yesterday. You are just in the middle of an exciting scene where Miss Lovecuddles reveals that she was actually behind everything that... wait a minute, Miss? He's not a boy?

Congratulations, you've just become a happy victim of Viewer Gender Confusion!

Sometimes this is because a cheap dub uses badly Cross-Dressing Voices, sometimes because the language you're enjoying your story in doesn't have gender differentiated pronouns, or because they have a name rarely used for that gender, or it was clear from the beginning and you were just holding the Idiot Ball for the day and missed it fabulously.

Compare She's a Man In Japan, where the character's gender actually was changed while adapting, and Bifauxnen and Samus Is a Girl, where you are expected to be mistaken at first. Contrast (or compare?) Dude Looks Like a Lady, when it's other characters who are confused.

See also Ambiguous Gender for characters who have no canonically stated gender. May be solved with the use (or lack) of Tertiary Sexual Characteristics. Can be seen as the viewer-perspective version of Unsettling Gender Reveal. Anything that makes the character's sex obvious may act as a Gender Reveal.

Examples of Viewer Gender Confusion are listed on these subpages:

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• Toys
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• Western Animation

Examples of Viewer Gender Confusion include:

Art

• Nearly any modern portrayal of Mori Ranmaru falls heavily into this if you aren't already aware of the historical figure. Historical artwork of him is a bit better.
• Recent artwork of Hindu gods or goddesses tends to portray them all as quite Bishonen. This is only partly true for historical depictions; while male figures were still drawn or sculpted as lithe, slender, and smooth-skinned, the secondary sexual characteristics of females were... much less ambiguous.
• Renaissance- era depictions of The Beloved Disciple (John) and sometimes even John the Baptist (!) show beardless pretty boys who could be taken for girls. This is probably the reason for the well-known claim that May Magdalena appears in Leonardo's Last Supper.

Toys

• Bionicle. Period. The toys have little room for Tertiary Sexual Characteristics due to their modular nature (it is a LEGO product line), so the only reliable way to pick out which one is the girl is the series' color-coding (the blue ones - at least the blue heroes - were the girls). Same thing in-story, but at least the characters can use voice and body language to tell genders apart. Roodaka, despite wearing black instead of blue, is the only woman with an actual feminine figure - but we've never seen males of her race, so for all we know they cause confusion in the other direction.
  • Actually, we have seen males—they looked exactly like her! The comic colorist tried to color-code the male by painting him green, but Word of God says that picture is non-canon, and all of the members of Roodaka's species (the Vortixx) have the exact same colors. Yes, even the males have huge breast-plates, wide hips, a ponytail, walk around in high-heeled boots, and not one of them has any variation in their coloring. The only way you can identify the genders is that if you see a Vortixx suffering or doing some incredibly tedious and tiring work, it's a male.
  • Things wouldn't be so difficult if the female sets had been designed to look the part. Jaller Inika, for instance, was the manly leader of his group, yet he was the only one who looked at least a bit feminine—the real girl, Hahli, received a huge chin, a bald head, and a mustache and goatee in the form of breathing tubes! The Inika were of course a Deconstruction of certain Toa-related tropes, but only in the story. Sets could have followed a more conventional approach. Although there is nothing to suggest this wasn't the result of test groups' dissatisfaction with female-looking toys.
    • Hahli's infamous tube-stache wasn't the first instance of a female character receiving a misleading mask. There was Macku, who had this long, pharaoh-beard like structure on the underside of her mask. The first movie redesigned that mask-type so that it would have a mechanical "beard". Macku's movie-mask got a shortened version, but it still looked off.
  • One prime example was with the "Mistika" characters, as Word of God had said one of the three Makuta in the set was to be female, and since none of those three were blue the color code wasn't going to be any help. When the fanbase got pictures, many guessed it was Krika, a sleek white character with a feminine-ish name and an elongated head/mask reminiscent of a ponytail. It turned out that the female was actually Gorast; a short, squat, green-and-black hag with four arms.
  • And did we mention that when the series got ReTooled with a new setting, the color code ceased to apply to gender? (The girl is still blue, but there's also a male blue character.)
    • But at least that one single female character was designed to actually have some feminine physical characteristics, like a slender body, and... wait, that was it.
  • There are some subtle hints sometimes though, such as Nokama Metru's smoother mask design, Hahli Mahri's sleeker mask and her angel wings, and Gali Mata's inverted legs and extra chest-piece. But that's as helpful as it can go.
  • Bionicle's successor Hero Factory has Breez, who is female despite looking just as manly as the others.
    • It helps that her full name is Natalie Breez, though others mostly just call her Breez anyway. As for her looks, her helmet's eye-holes at least looked feminine at first. Then, she switched them to a generic design, along with adapting this huge, manly chin underneath.
• The Beanie Baby Erin. Paired up with the Princess Diana bear. Green, as opposed to Diana's more feminine purple. Especially if you were unaware of the differences between Aaron and Erin (phonetically identical) as a child.
• The toyline-only character Sonar from Beast Wars is considered female by some fans due to the lack of gender-specific pronouns on the toy's bio.
  • Confirmed in the comics, which took advantage of the lack of pronouns to add another female to the ranks.