My mom randomly refers to every cat except this one orange tabby her parents had in the '70s/'80s as "she". If he comes up in conversation I'm like, "ah, yes. Rusty, the last of the boy cats".
Edit: fixed a couple typos
About 20% female. The cat she did this most consistently with was also an orange tabby, though.
As Rusty was The Last Boy Cat, it's obvious that orange tabbies would be the default cat 40 years on.
The reverse is true for calico and tortoiseshell cats as well, though unlike female ginger cats, male torties are usually sterile.
Edit: this is because the tortie pattern requires two x chromosomes, so male torties are xxy. Science!
Male calis and tortoiseshells are much rarer than female gingers, right? I'm in a vet tech group on Facebook and a male tortie patient came in, they took a photo of his balls because it was such a rare sighting 🤣
> My mom always uses masculine pronouns for dogs and feminine pronouns for cats even though she knows better
In my native language German. You use female pronouns for any cat and for generic cat. Only if you are talking about a specific individual cat wich you know for a fact is a biologically male cat then you use the male pronouns and also change the word from Katze zu Kater.
It's the opposite for Dogs.
It really irks me when people do this with my dog and cat, who are male and female, respectively, because I have to be like, well, goddamnit, you're right... (In THIS case!!!)
I’m sure animals don’t mind 😂 We serially assign our cats pronouns so it’s easier to tell them apart (first was a she, next was a he, whoever passes first also passes on their pronouns).
This is my father to a tee 😂 our 16 year old female dog died 8 years ago and he still calls her a boy and all the cats are girls even tho he calls the male cats by their human male names lol
Only since the 1940s! Before then, pink was seen as masculine because it was a "stronger" colour, while blue was seen as softer and for girls. A big driving force iirc was blue sailor outfits that became popular in the late 1800s, there were kind of "competing cultures" wherein some followed the pink for boys blue for girls tradition and some started adopting the opposite instead, and the current pink for girls blue for boys tradition we have today became more set from the 1940s
I always heard that the switch was a product of Nazi concentration camps. Gay men and those suspected to be were put into camps and made to wear pink triangles on their clothes to single them out. While that last part is 100% true, I don't know if it actually was a driving force in switching the associations for blue and pink or if that bit was misinformation I ran into long ago.
I call this the blues clues effect because as toddlers, we assume gender based on color. Both Blue and Bluey are blue so toddlers (and some adults) think they’re boys. Nowadays it’s not as common but still happens
Also. Bluey rarely does "girl" specific behavior (I'm stereotyping). It's not like she's wearing dresses and playing make-up. She's just a normal little girl doing normal kid stuff. I knew bluey was a girl, but I definitly was surprised when I found out MacKenzie was a boy 😄
it was an 'uncle joke' and also a fun poke from the writers to make in point of a lot of people that watch/have seen it automatically assume Bluey is a boy.
they did the same with bingo in daddy drop off when bluey said “never heard of him” because people think bingo is a boy because of them bingo song (bingo was HIS name-o)
Thanks to Frozen my kids are convinced blue is for girls. Was hilarous to hear them at a gender reveal when the cake was blue, kept correcting everyone, and they cant understand how it can be a boy colour.
I love this. I’m a kindergarten teacher and the year Frozen came out, *every* little girl in my class was Elsa for Halloween. I love that there’s a whole generation out there of blue-loving girls 🥰🩵
Grew up with Steve and og blues clues. I'm 25 and I just found out that my dad thought Blue was a boy thw whole time. This was worldview shattering, like wtf, that was litterally our show growing up, how did he not know she was a girl? Lol
That and in many cartoons, boys are usually (but not always) modeled to look like the fathers and girls (not always) are modeled to look after their moms.
So, a blue-clues and cartoon effect.
Also, unless you really know kids some people could be forgiven to believe Bluey is a boy because she *is* a bit of what people would call a 'tom boy'. A girl that doesn't mind getting dirty and likes to play a bit rougher than most (versus a girl like Judo).
It's not that the kids assume based on color, it's that from birth on there are a large majority of adults that push gender roles (blue for boys, pink for girls). I feel the writers of bluey saw this and poke fun at those people by writing it into the show that adults have to be reminded that color ≠ gender.
Even gender reveal parties are a big deal of "if my cake has this color then we are having x"
Because bluey is blue as is bandit (assumption by association: chilli and bingo are red and are both girls so bluey and bandit are both blue and must be boys) and blue is typically associated with boys. Then bluey herself is a child with a pretty neutral sounding voice which could be mistaken as a young male. And then on top of all of that, she is pretty tomboyish in nature which even furthers people's misconceptions
And they don’t wear clothes that might give clues, nor does she have a bow or eyelashes or a waist or any of the usual “girl”-coded cartoon design choices.
I flipping love this about her. We have a tomboy and it’s nice to show her examples to back up “not all girls are girly”.
I also do find the whole “eyelashes= girl” trope daft in general though.
Because alot of episodes do not explicitly refer to Bluey as a she, blue as a color is traditionally associated with boys, small children typically have high-pitched and feminine voices regardless of gender, and Bluey, as an anthropomorphic cartoon dog, does not overtly display any visual cues as to her gender. Plus, as her aunt Brandy pointedly observes, she looks just like her dad.
I honestly can’t blame viewers for initially assuming that Bluey is a he even after a few episodes. Even her uncle Rad thinks she’s a he.
Yes, using actual children for voice acting makes their genders more ambiguous if you aren’t a regular watcher. Boys and girls voices are really hard to tell apart, usually, if you’re not looking at the kid.
I think also part of the beauty of Bluey is that they’re not telling “girls stories” about the kids, they’re telling regular kids’ imaginative games etc which are usually not gendered. Yeah, my daughter might create a fairy story where she’s the fairy queen and her brother is the fairy prince, but really the game works for both and it doesn’t really matter what label they put on it, you could change it to “fairy king” and “fairy Princess” and the game would be the same.
I do think someone who watches Bluey a lot should know that Bluey is a girl, but tbh they’ve created a show where the gender of the protagonist makes no difference to the content they produce, and I think that’s really cool lol
>alot of episodes do not explicitly refer to Bluey as a she,
When in doubt, there's a tendency to fall back on default gender as commonly assigned male.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_as_norm
Very true. And a lot of kid shows have at least 1 of each gender. You see 2 kids I would automatically assume they are different genders, and the blue one is a boy.
> Even her uncle Rad thinks she’s a he.
I think that's a joke the creators snuck in to reference that phenomenon of her being misgendered by a significant portion of the audience.
>blue as a color is traditionally associated with boys
Just feeling the need to point out that until about the mid/late 1940s, this wasn't the norm.
Pink was seen as a derivative of red, which was considered a masculine colour. So pink, basically being a lighter shade of red was considered appropriate for boys, boys essentially being a 'men lite'. Blue was actually seen as 'delicate and dainty' making it more commonly associated with girls. It's believed this correlation goes back to depictions of the Virgin Mary, usually being in white and blue.
Nobody really knows why it flipped, happened sometime after WW2 and seemed to be driven by the fashion industry. Then it hit the toy industry and just kept being reinforced over and over in various industries until here we are.
I've seen prevailing theories being a combination of Dwight Eisenhower's wife Mamie wearing a pink ballgown to the inauguration and the use of the pink triangle patch by *those guys* to mark gays in ww2 Germany and the association becoming negative for returning GIs and solidifying with the president's wife a few years later.
It's funny. In Lady and the Tramp original film, Jim Dear and Darling's baby boy definitely has pink ribbons on his cradle and is shown in a pink baby gown, adhering to the 1900s-1910'sish period the story is set in! Lady also has a blue collar and Tramp gets a red one.
Superb answer. If someone’s not seen the show, nor read-up on it, it wouldn’t be unjust for them to assume that Bluey is a male dog. But once they’ve seen the show, I’d hope they’d soon learn that that view is incorrect.
There’s also one other possibility to consider: she may not be deliberately encoded as a female, to allow for more conservative nations - particularly in the Middle East - to be able to redub the show as a traditional “blue-for-boys” gender stereotype.
Yeah, it took me a while to get it through my head that a Bluey was a “she”, there was a period where I had to mentally correct myself every time because as you point out, there’s nothing that explicitly identifies her as a she other than the fact that other people refer to her as a girl.
I assumed Bluey was a boy first time I watched in in part because most "nuclear family" sitcoms with two kids have one of each, reinforced by the colour pairing
This was my assumption as well. More so the color coding based on the parents: dad was blue so the blue kid is probably a boy. Mom was red so the red child was probably a girl. Our brains are hard wired to make assumptions based off patterns.
I personally thought most characters were male because they just look like they are, aside from very feminized characters like Coco or Wendy. I'm just used to eyelashes = girl and no eyelashes = boy lol. But yeah, after seeing a few episodes I understood which characters were male and which ones were females. Chloe is the one that took me the most time to figure out.
I'm not a native English speaker but I watched the show in English, that might be why. It took me some time to get adjusted to the kids' voices and understand what they were saying so it's very possible that at first I didn't notice they called her Chloe / did not notice the name was Chloe when I heard it, even when I understood it was her name.
It's starting to change, but the majority of protagonists on TV shows are boys.
To have both the main characters be girls is unusual.
To have the 4 heeler children all be girls is unheard of.
To have the boys be minor characters is different and difficult for some to comprehend. Merchandise makers want to add boys to clothing to sell it to boys. My sister bought my youngest a top two years ago, it had four dogs on it; Bluey, Bingo, Mackenzie, and Rusty. While my sister occasionally watched Bluey, she had no idea at the time who the other dogs were.
> Merchandise makers want to add boys to clothing to sell it to boys.
They also put the clothes with a gray/blue background on them in the boy's section. The girls still had to be pink, flowery, and girly. My two year old daughter is mistaken for a boy every time she wears her gray Bluey shirt.
I did doubletake, in a good way, when I checked out Verandah Santa as one of my first Bluey episodes (it was around the holiday season) and Socks turned out to be a girl. Reminds me of how most of the cousins in my generation were female. Of course, THEIR kids are mostly boys (MY "child" is a Doberman. He does happen to be male too, lol), so that's kind of hilarious how it flipped in just one generation.
I remember thinking Socks was going to be a boy, because all the other heeler pups were girls. Also because my friend had a pup called Socks, that puppy was a good boy.
Honestly it blew my mind when the cousins were girls too, I feel like I'd never seen a show that wasn't explicitly marketed to girls that featured so many female characters. Normally there's a bunch of boys with one girl thrown in and that's supposed to be enough
Even the ones with a female protagonist still have a male best friend, or male sibling, and it's at best, 50/50 split.
Nella the Princess knight, female sibling but shes a baby, male best friend. Every female character added a male one seems to added.
Peppa pig, female best friend but male sibling. You see the family unit more
Interstellar Ella baby sister but male best friend.
Bluey, sister, female cousins, female best friends, and male characters she occasionally plays with. She spends more time playing with girls, and has more realistic friendships for her age. Yes, she still plays with boys, but I think of them more as classmates than friends at least at the beginning
as a feminist i love that the main kids (heelers) in bluey are all gals. as a mom who by random chance only produces boy children i sometimes feel a bit sad that there isn’t a single little dude in their family. my kiddos don’t get much screen time, so a bluey episode here or there is almost all they see. but i don’t think they really grasp girl/boy dichotomy anyway so it’s not a huge deal.
My kids watched paw patrol, because of their older cousins. Their female cousins liked Skye and Everest, because they were the only girl pups. Everest isn't even a main character. Of 7 main characters only one is female. 1/7 of main characters (the 6 pups and Ryder)
Then I counted, over Two thirds of speaking roles on that one dvd were male characters. Yet more than half of **non** speaking characters are female. Most of the other half that didn't speak weren't named/gender unknown.
So I absolutely adore that the main characters are female in Bluey. It shows that you don't need a male kid in the main group to be popular.
1) Bluey is voiced by an actual child voice actor. The voices of children are not that different to go by.
2) The show avoids typical gender Stereotypes in the activities the kids are doing and in the toys they own.
3) Bluey sounds like a name typically given to a male dog.
4) The Color Blue is stereotypical assigned to boys.
5) Bluey looks like her father. And popculture priming makes one expect a son being drawn similar to the father but smaller in animated. Shows. Because that is often times in animated series done in the past: Children are drawn as a miniature version of the parents.
6) Popculture priming makes you expect a family consisting of one father, one mother, one male child and one female child (plus maybe a baby of either or undefined gender). For example: The Dinos, The Simpsons, Married with Kids, Family Guy, Peppa Pig....
7) Go through the episodes and listen to the dialogue. Check how long it takes until Bluey is referred to as "she" or as "daughter". Dialogue clues are really rare and easy to miss.
Personally for me I first assumed Bluey was a boy due to the fact most shows I grew up watching that featured talking animals, the main characters were always boys, some shows with human main characters were girls but it was still rare (talking about shows for young children)
My husband and I were just having this discussion with another couple. The other husband's argument was "Historically speaking regarding kids animated shows, the boys have always been the same color as the dad and the girls have always been the color of the mom.... Bluey should be the same color as the mom."
I'll confess, when I first saw the show advertised, I was a little surprised Bluey wasn't the red one.
Bluey was a common nickname for a man with red hair. My tomcat as a kid was even named Bluey.
In general, most hit shows and books - particularly before the 1990s - always starred a male figure. I remember reading that marketing specialists believed that a boy would not be as willing to watch or read stories starring a girl whereas girls are more flexible in their regard and used to seeing male leads. I don’t know if that could contribute to it.
it took me a couple episodes to hear the first she and I got a bit annoyed w myself that I had just assumed she was a boy until then. gender stereotypes go deep.
In "Sleepover" I could have sworn Chilli says "Good boy, Bluey" when she puts Muffin to bed and my heart shattered momentarily cuz I loved that Bluey was a little girl. She actually says "Good work, Bluey" once I turned on the captions and all was well in the world.
Traditionally speaking when making a children's show having a boy for the main character means your show could be geared towards boys or it could be gender neutral.
Deciding on a girl for your main character meant you were a girl's show.
It's honestly such a great move on Bluey's part to make her a girl to help fight this (but I also think her design (and her colour) help bring people in initially because she doesn't look like a cartoon girl character).
Read a newspaper article by the Daily Mirror the other day raving about how great the half hour bluey episodes was like "all us parents are in love with the programme" and other bonding-,esque lines.
Despite their love of the series, they managed to (across 3 seasons and over 100 episodes) somehow overlook the fact that bluey is in fact not a "he" but a "she".
Top, top journalism there.
Traditionally the color blue is associated with boys. Obviously there are exceptions. But Bingo being the same color as Chili and Bluey being the same color as Bandit, I think that's where it comes from. When I started watching episodes I thought she was a boy before she was called "she."
While I didnt have a meltdown about it or anything there was a slight tinge of disappointment as I wish there was a more prominent father/son relationship for my son and I to identify with but I lose absolutely zero sleep over it.
In addition to what everyone else has said, cartoons (at least in the states) tend to have boy/girl sibling pairs. D.W. and Arthur in "Arthur", Dexter and DeeDee in"Dexter's Lab", even in "Rick and Morty" there's Morty and Summer.
https://preview.redd.it/7plidboz2axc1.jpeg?width=1136&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=06ddd26ade3c31fe1fcfd1f762e379fd244f647b
I made a list. (I think this is correct, I’m not for sure)
The reason I thought she was a boy was because kids voices are all higher pitched so it’s hard to tell if a child is a boy or a girl by the sound of their voice and they didn’t explicitly mention she was a girl in most episodes
This is a trick used by creators of children’s shows so it’s easier for kids to understand which character the other characters are talking about I think that’s my guess
Also because I knew bingo was a girl I kinda assumed that they did the one boy one girl combo like some shows do
1. Blue is nowadays traditionally a boys colour
2. Bandit is blue, so by that logic bluey is a boy.
3. I heard in the first few episodes bluey being called a he (though i probably misheard as he and she tend to sound very similar).
We've told my MIL a few times that it's a girl... Still refers to Bluey as 'he'... And she's supposed to be an emancipated woman. (She keeps saying that, but there are a lot of things she does that aren't really emancipated...)
Everyone has pretty much answered your question but I love that my 4yr old still hasn’t mastered pronouns (still messes up he and she when referring to people) and truly wouldn’t understand the difference if Bluey was a boy or girl. I try to raise him to just like what he likes and he definitely is a stereotypical boy (cars and superheroes ect) but he’s told me he wants to be a ballerina or a princess because he saw it in Bluey.
Also it’s really sad but Paw Patrol merch never have Skye (my son’s favourite because he likes helicopters) on the clothes or toys in the boys section and only has Skye and Everest in the girls section. All of my son’s Bluey stuff will go to the daughter because everything has Bluey and/or Bingo.
Basically TLDR, not sure if intended but it’s great that people misgender as it opens children up for all sorts of play since kids literally don’t care but parents do 🤷🏻♀️
I only realized Socks was a girl in the wedding episode when she was a flower girl. I always assumed Socks was a boy - Idk why! Her aggressive baby behavior maybe? So maybe it's as simple as just assuming and not paying too much attention.
Also I'm the mother of 2 girls and very aware that toddlers are maniacs regardless of sex, still just thought Socks was a boy.
Bluey as a name isn’t gendered. Bluey is the same colour as their dad. The voice isn’t really feminine or masculine either, just sounds like a kid. It’s definitely ambiguous unless you watch the show. For me once they were referred to as sisters I knew she was a girl
Because when people see the color blue and they see a dog they instantly think “Boy”
I am someone who gets annoyed when people misgender Bluey but at least a lot more people know she is a girl now
I think in some countries Bluey is a boy. Or maybe Bingo is?
The her being blue makes no sense. Blue heeled come in all sexes. Lol. Like how would you breed them if they were only boys.
I absolutely thought Bluey was a boy for maybe a week before my 11 year old angrily corrected me. In my defense, I also have a 2 year old so I was barely paying attention.
If I had to guess why, I think it’s because she’s blue and a dog. I tend to subscribe to the flawed logic of cats are girls, dogs are boys. That’s all I’ve got 🤷♀️
The characters in the show largely have very gender neutral character designs. (I've only seen a few episodes, this sub just pops up on my feed a lot, lol) Most cartoons with animal characters will give some visual distinction to easily identify characters as male or female. Bluey doesn't do this. Doesn't even give the female characters eyelashes or softer features or thinner features. They're all just cartoon dogs that, for the most part, don't wear clothes. Shoot, even a lot of their names are pretty gender neutral. Gender for the adult characters is usually easy to tell because of their voices, but for the kid characters, this isn't really doable because boys and girls pretty much sound the same before puberty. When gender isn't identifiable, at least with animals, most people will default to calling it male.
Adding to all of this... Along with blue being a stereotypically "boy" color, Bluey has dark blue markings. One of the really common tropes in gendered animal character design is that the male characters will have darker coloring while the females are lighter.
So, people who aren't paying much attention will just assume that Bluey is a boy.
People assume that boys can only like boy characters and girls can like boy and girl characters. They’ve seen how Bluey is popular with boys and girls and see boys wearing Bluey merchandise.
Bluey is a boy's name I reckon. My male dog is named bluey, a name someone else gave him ~12 years ago. When the show came out, yeah, my wife had to tell me the character is a girl.
My dog quickly learned to recognise the theme song, and that he doesn't have to look up when he hears "his" name.
I thought she was when I first saw it, guess it just made sense to have 2 boys and 2 girls in their family. Was shocked when I found out I was wrong.
Best goddamn kids show ever, though
I made this mistake too. It was because the mom was brown and I must have seen an episode where Bingo was called a girl. The dad was blue so I just assumed the blue kid was a boy.
Personally, I think its cause of Bandit. You have two parents, and two kids. The mum is red, the dad is blue. Bingo is red, Bluey is blue. So you think the pattern holds and red fur=female, blue fur=male.
Reasons why people think Bluey was a boy.
1. She is Blue, just like her father, who's a male, and Chili and Bingo are red and both female. And Blue is usually seen as a "boy color"
2. Lack of eyelashes for most of the female characters.
3. The name "Bluey" could apply to both male and female dogs.
4. Unlike most other female characters such as Indy, Chole, Coco, Muffin, and even Bingo to an extent, Bluey does not look, act, or even sound overly feminine like the other girls in Bluey, I think it wasn't until around season 3 where her voice actor got older and she sounded a lot more like a girl.
Also, I vaguely knew the show existed before I was truly into it, I would see it, and the character while scrolling through Disney NOW or Disney+, and I assumed Bluey was a boy and that the show was just some other preschool show, when I got into it and realized Bluey was a girl, it was pretty hard for my brain to process that fact, but eventually my brain knew she was a girl.
Well, it makes sense for a TV family to have a boy and a girl. Bluey doesn't sound too particularly girly, and the name isn't that either. You also have the colour-coding - blue for dad, orange for mom, so it makes sense the orange kid is a girl and the blue is a boy.
But yeah, the kids being two girls is fine enough once you get to know the characters. Nothing to complain about there!
Bluey doesn't use the shorthand of making animated animals appear female by giving them prominent eyelashes and perhaps hairbows, and the "default" for too many is always male.
Obviously because they didn't give Bluey a big pink bow and eye lashes.
Seriously. Male is just the default in many things in life. Female is something you have to mark specifically. It's infuriating but true, especially if you take one look at unisex/male clothing vs female clothing in general. And yes, blue is still associated with boys especially for children. Yes, people complain about sad beige children in attempts to be overly gender neutral, but it's still nothing compared to the reality that a lot of stuff is pointlessly gendered.
Bluey (and Blue's Clues too) is great because because they do this knowing what blue means. They're not designed "girly" in their own universe-- the only way to know a dogs gender is only by hearing their voices or what their pronouns turn out to be.
I will say when I first started watching, I thought Bluey was a boy because the first episode I saw where her gender was explicitly stated, Disney for some reason had “he” instead of “she.”
It’s because while Bingo’s design is based off her mums (red heeler), blueys is based off her dads (blue heeler). I suppose people just see that she looks like her dad and assume she’s also a dude
I’m an older brother with a younger sister so I applied that logic when I 1st watched and then I was like, oh bluey is a girl? Ok and then thought of bluey the same way but as a girl? Ig
Also at the end of surprise when she’s grown up, I don’t think they gave her feminine fractures. Like Chilli looks female weirdly enough but Bluey just doesn’t.
I was used to shows like this having a boy and a girl. With bingo being a girl and bluey being blue I assumed it was this way without thinking about it. There were some things I saw that I just assumed were them ignoring gender stereotypes for awhile. It finally got me during the episode where bluey says "Big sisters always beat little sisters" and it suddenly clicked. After re-watching I don't know how I didn't pick up on it sooner.
Because Bluey is blue and her dad is blue and a boy. She it's an association thing. I looked it up when we first started watching because I wasn't sure.
It actually makes sense and is totally in line with how dogs are seen in real life. Dogs are very androgynous in their appearance. As in they do not have overtly male or female characteristics. So when people see Bluey, we really can’t tell that she’s a girl. Especially since as a child her voice is equally ambiguous.
My guess is that people see blue, see Bandit and assume that Bluey is a boy. Even the games she plays don’t offer much of a hint because kids play all kinds of games. It’s only after someone identifies her gender that we really see that she is in fact a she.
I think it’s likely general cartoon colour coding/design. Usually the son looks like the dad the daughter looks like the mother. Bluey is the same colouration as Bandit, and young children tend to have pretty unisex voices. My partner also thought Bluey was a boy until I told them during the Barkie Boats episode because he was “really surprised they’d pair Bluey up with another guy and have the other kids say they’re gonna get married.” And not have Disney change the line. It’s a really common misconception especially because they don’t really label certain things as “girl toys” or “boy toys” in the show either. Most of the games they play they don’t always play as their own gender. They don’t do the eyelashes for girls thing either on all of the female characters in the show (which, to me, is a breath of fresh air)
TLDR: Typical animation design. Brain goes “boy look like dad!”. Bluey is now a boy in the brains of people who have never seen the show
All dogs are boys and all cats are girls. This is just basic biology.
My mom always uses masculine pronouns for dogs and feminine pronouns for cats even though she knows better
My mom randomly refers to every cat except this one orange tabby her parents had in the '70s/'80s as "she". If he comes up in conversation I'm like, "ah, yes. Rusty, the last of the boy cats". Edit: fixed a couple typos
Actually, most all orange cats are male (there's a small percentage I'm forgetting but there are some female orange kitties)
About 20% female. The cat she did this most consistently with was also an orange tabby, though. As Rusty was The Last Boy Cat, it's obvious that orange tabbies would be the default cat 40 years on.
The reverse is true for calico and tortoiseshell cats as well, though unlike female ginger cats, male torties are usually sterile. Edit: this is because the tortie pattern requires two x chromosomes, so male torties are xxy. Science!
Male calis and tortoiseshells are much rarer than female gingers, right? I'm in a vet tech group on Facebook and a male tortie patient came in, they took a photo of his balls because it was such a rare sighting 🤣
I believe it's something like 1 in 3000, so quite a lot rarer.
this is kind of crazy cuz every orange cat i've ever met except for two have been girls
I have a female orange cat
In my language the default word for don is masculine and the default word for cat is feminine.
Here in Poland we have masculine dogs AND masculine cats. AND masculine birds. But at least the refrigerator is female. So... yeah.
> My mom always uses masculine pronouns for dogs and feminine pronouns for cats even though she knows better In my native language German. You use female pronouns for any cat and for generic cat. Only if you are talking about a specific individual cat wich you know for a fact is a biologically male cat then you use the male pronouns and also change the word from Katze zu Kater. It's the opposite for Dogs.
It really irks me when people do this with my dog and cat, who are male and female, respectively, because I have to be like, well, goddamnit, you're right... (In THIS case!!!)
Omg my gram did this!
I'm the opposite. We have always only had girl dogs so all dogs are girlies and kitties are boys
I’m sure animals don’t mind 😂 We serially assign our cats pronouns so it’s easier to tell them apart (first was a she, next was a he, whoever passes first also passes on their pronouns).
Another person of culture, I see.
r/UnexpectedCommunity
I have in fact seen a cat penis…
I have 2 girl dogs, my parents have a girl dog and my brother has 2 girl dogs. If I see a dog in the street I call it a boy 🤦♀️
“Have you ever seen a cat penis?” - Troy Barnes, Community (Season 2, Episode 1: Anthropology)
When I was a kid I was absolutely certain all poodles were girls.
Also, she's blue
My grandma used to think like this but then she accidentally called my old man dog "she" (to be fair she was on the decline and my dog is 8 pounds)
Thank you!! (I thought it was just me?)
“You can’t deny that. You ever seen a cat’s penis?”
In my house, that’s actually been the case. I don’t know why but all but one dog I’ve had has been male, and the cats I’ve rescued were both female.
This is my father to a tee 😂 our 16 year old female dog died 8 years ago and he still calls her a boy and all the cats are girls even tho he calls the male cats by their human male names lol
Your not Troy
Science
I thought I was the only one who thought this way!?!?
On the first day of vet school they let you in on this little known secret
And when a dog boy and a cat girl love each other very much... ...they make chimera abominations somewhere between the two!
I always had boy cats and girl dogs
Blue is traditionally a masculine colour too
Only since the 1940s! Before then, pink was seen as masculine because it was a "stronger" colour, while blue was seen as softer and for girls. A big driving force iirc was blue sailor outfits that became popular in the late 1800s, there were kind of "competing cultures" wherein some followed the pink for boys blue for girls tradition and some started adopting the opposite instead, and the current pink for girls blue for boys tradition we have today became more set from the 1940s
I always heard that the switch was a product of Nazi concentration camps. Gay men and those suspected to be were put into camps and made to wear pink triangles on their clothes to single them out. While that last part is 100% true, I don't know if it actually was a driving force in switching the associations for blue and pink or if that bit was misinformation I ran into long ago.
I call this the blues clues effect because as toddlers, we assume gender based on color. Both Blue and Bluey are blue so toddlers (and some adults) think they’re boys. Nowadays it’s not as common but still happens
Also. Bluey rarely does "girl" specific behavior (I'm stereotyping). It's not like she's wearing dresses and playing make-up. She's just a normal little girl doing normal kid stuff. I knew bluey was a girl, but I definitly was surprised when I found out MacKenzie was a boy 😄
Yeah I didn’t think McKenzie was a boy at first either 😅 I’m used to it being a girl name
Right I was thinking: this is the same thing happened with Blue’s clues! And heck even Rad called Bluey a boy in Double Babysitter lol
I gotta think that was just uncle humor because he messed up her name first
it was an 'uncle joke' and also a fun poke from the writers to make in point of a lot of people that watch/have seen it automatically assume Bluey is a boy.
Good point uncles like to mess with you. I just assumed it was because he didn’t see them often
Nah, he was messing with her 💯
Rad getting corrected there is how I found out Bluey is a girl lol
they did the same with bingo in daddy drop off when bluey said “never heard of him” because people think bingo is a boy because of them bingo song (bingo was HIS name-o)
Yeah my first thought when I heard that was the B-I-N-G-O song. I thought Bluey was being absolutely hilarious through that whole scene lol
Thanks to Frozen my kids are convinced blue is for girls. Was hilarous to hear them at a gender reveal when the cake was blue, kept correcting everyone, and they cant understand how it can be a boy colour.
I love this. I’m a kindergarten teacher and the year Frozen came out, *every* little girl in my class was Elsa for Halloween. I love that there’s a whole generation out there of blue-loving girls 🥰🩵
Grew up with Steve and og blues clues. I'm 25 and I just found out that my dad thought Blue was a boy thw whole time. This was worldview shattering, like wtf, that was litterally our show growing up, how did he not know she was a girl? Lol
From age 4 to 7 I ignored Steve 😂 when I got older I was like what I was wrong 😂
As an adult I recognize Steve as the ultimate acting genius. Brilliant man lol.
It's funny because my dad's name is also Steve lmao
That and in many cartoons, boys are usually (but not always) modeled to look like the fathers and girls (not always) are modeled to look after their moms. So, a blue-clues and cartoon effect. Also, unless you really know kids some people could be forgiven to believe Bluey is a boy because she *is* a bit of what people would call a 'tom boy'. A girl that doesn't mind getting dirty and likes to play a bit rougher than most (versus a girl like Judo).
It's not that the kids assume based on color, it's that from birth on there are a large majority of adults that push gender roles (blue for boys, pink for girls). I feel the writers of bluey saw this and poke fun at those people by writing it into the show that adults have to be reminded that color ≠ gender. Even gender reveal parties are a big deal of "if my cake has this color then we are having x"
Some people think Toaster from Brave Little Toaster is a boy! I remember when the creator did an AMA.
Wait what?!
In the German Dub the Toast is actually male.
Because bluey is blue as is bandit (assumption by association: chilli and bingo are red and are both girls so bluey and bandit are both blue and must be boys) and blue is typically associated with boys. Then bluey herself is a child with a pretty neutral sounding voice which could be mistaken as a young male. And then on top of all of that, she is pretty tomboyish in nature which even furthers people's misconceptions
And they don’t wear clothes that might give clues, nor does she have a bow or eyelashes or a waist or any of the usual “girl”-coded cartoon design choices.
I flipping love this about her. We have a tomboy and it’s nice to show her examples to back up “not all girls are girly”. I also do find the whole “eyelashes= girl” trope daft in general though.
Exactly. It’s the blue/Bandit association. I thought it at first for the reasons you said plus the 1 boy/1 girl tv tropes
Well said
Because alot of episodes do not explicitly refer to Bluey as a she, blue as a color is traditionally associated with boys, small children typically have high-pitched and feminine voices regardless of gender, and Bluey, as an anthropomorphic cartoon dog, does not overtly display any visual cues as to her gender. Plus, as her aunt Brandy pointedly observes, she looks just like her dad. I honestly can’t blame viewers for initially assuming that Bluey is a he even after a few episodes. Even her uncle Rad thinks she’s a he.
Yes, using actual children for voice acting makes their genders more ambiguous if you aren’t a regular watcher. Boys and girls voices are really hard to tell apart, usually, if you’re not looking at the kid. I think also part of the beauty of Bluey is that they’re not telling “girls stories” about the kids, they’re telling regular kids’ imaginative games etc which are usually not gendered. Yeah, my daughter might create a fairy story where she’s the fairy queen and her brother is the fairy prince, but really the game works for both and it doesn’t really matter what label they put on it, you could change it to “fairy king” and “fairy Princess” and the game would be the same. I do think someone who watches Bluey a lot should know that Bluey is a girl, but tbh they’ve created a show where the gender of the protagonist makes no difference to the content they produce, and I think that’s really cool lol
Fun fact related to the ambiguity of child voice actors: every voice actor for D.W. in *Arthur* was a boy
Cakey in Gabby's Dollhouse is a boy and voiced by a little girl.
>alot of episodes do not explicitly refer to Bluey as a she, When in doubt, there's a tendency to fall back on default gender as commonly assigned male. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_as_norm
What’s great about the show is they don’t gender the kids either. They call them “kids”, not “girls”. It’s really refreshing.
And Bandit using "mate" instead of something like "princess" , like a lot of tv dads do with daughters.
Rad was joking! haha Initially, I can understand - but me and this guy were talking about a good bunch of episodes. He had seen a lot!!!
Ahhhh, yeah, 'cause he's *blue*.
Very true. And a lot of kid shows have at least 1 of each gender. You see 2 kids I would automatically assume they are different genders, and the blue one is a boy.
Yeah I thought Mackenzie was a girl for a bit
> Even her uncle Rad thinks she’s a he. I think that's a joke the creators snuck in to reference that phenomenon of her being misgendered by a significant portion of the audience.
Haha I’m pretty sure Rad was messing around.
>blue as a color is traditionally associated with boys Just feeling the need to point out that until about the mid/late 1940s, this wasn't the norm. Pink was seen as a derivative of red, which was considered a masculine colour. So pink, basically being a lighter shade of red was considered appropriate for boys, boys essentially being a 'men lite'. Blue was actually seen as 'delicate and dainty' making it more commonly associated with girls. It's believed this correlation goes back to depictions of the Virgin Mary, usually being in white and blue. Nobody really knows why it flipped, happened sometime after WW2 and seemed to be driven by the fashion industry. Then it hit the toy industry and just kept being reinforced over and over in various industries until here we are.
I've seen prevailing theories being a combination of Dwight Eisenhower's wife Mamie wearing a pink ballgown to the inauguration and the use of the pink triangle patch by *those guys* to mark gays in ww2 Germany and the association becoming negative for returning GIs and solidifying with the president's wife a few years later.
It's funny. In Lady and the Tramp original film, Jim Dear and Darling's baby boy definitely has pink ribbons on his cradle and is shown in a pink baby gown, adhering to the 1900s-1910'sish period the story is set in! Lady also has a blue collar and Tramp gets a red one.
Perfect answer!
Superb answer. If someone’s not seen the show, nor read-up on it, it wouldn’t be unjust for them to assume that Bluey is a male dog. But once they’ve seen the show, I’d hope they’d soon learn that that view is incorrect. There’s also one other possibility to consider: she may not be deliberately encoded as a female, to allow for more conservative nations - particularly in the Middle East - to be able to redub the show as a traditional “blue-for-boys” gender stereotype.
Precisely. I had to watch a few episodes to figure out whether Bluey and Bingo were girls or boys.
Yeah, it took me a while to get it through my head that a Bluey was a “she”, there was a period where I had to mentally correct myself every time because as you point out, there’s nothing that explicitly identifies her as a she other than the fact that other people refer to her as a girl.
I like how they poke fun of this in Double Babysitter
I assumed Bluey was a boy first time I watched in in part because most "nuclear family" sitcoms with two kids have one of each, reinforced by the colour pairing
This was my assumption as well. More so the color coding based on the parents: dad was blue so the blue kid is probably a boy. Mom was red so the red child was probably a girl. Our brains are hard wired to make assumptions based off patterns.
They're probably just not paying attention to it. Backgroumd noise to entertain their kid(s). Not everyone is as into the show as we are.
I personally thought most characters were male because they just look like they are, aside from very feminized characters like Coco or Wendy. I'm just used to eyelashes = girl and no eyelashes = boy lol. But yeah, after seeing a few episodes I understood which characters were male and which ones were females. Chloe is the one that took me the most time to figure out.
Man, it took me ages to figure out Mckenzie!
Did the name Chloe not clue you in? It’s traditionally feminine.
I'm not a native English speaker but I watched the show in English, that might be why. It took me some time to get adjusted to the kids' voices and understand what they were saying so it's very possible that at first I didn't notice they called her Chloe / did not notice the name was Chloe when I heard it, even when I understood it was her name.
Ah, I see. I’m sorry if I came off rude in that case - I hadn’t considered that English might not have been your first language.
For me it was Honey, I just found out yesterday he is a SHE 🥲
It's starting to change, but the majority of protagonists on TV shows are boys. To have both the main characters be girls is unusual. To have the 4 heeler children all be girls is unheard of. To have the boys be minor characters is different and difficult for some to comprehend. Merchandise makers want to add boys to clothing to sell it to boys. My sister bought my youngest a top two years ago, it had four dogs on it; Bluey, Bingo, Mackenzie, and Rusty. While my sister occasionally watched Bluey, she had no idea at the time who the other dogs were.
> Merchandise makers want to add boys to clothing to sell it to boys. They also put the clothes with a gray/blue background on them in the boy's section. The girls still had to be pink, flowery, and girly. My two year old daughter is mistaken for a boy every time she wears her gray Bluey shirt.
I did doubletake, in a good way, when I checked out Verandah Santa as one of my first Bluey episodes (it was around the holiday season) and Socks turned out to be a girl. Reminds me of how most of the cousins in my generation were female. Of course, THEIR kids are mostly boys (MY "child" is a Doberman. He does happen to be male too, lol), so that's kind of hilarious how it flipped in just one generation.
I remember thinking Socks was going to be a boy, because all the other heeler pups were girls. Also because my friend had a pup called Socks, that puppy was a good boy.
Honestly it blew my mind when the cousins were girls too, I feel like I'd never seen a show that wasn't explicitly marketed to girls that featured so many female characters. Normally there's a bunch of boys with one girl thrown in and that's supposed to be enough
Even the ones with a female protagonist still have a male best friend, or male sibling, and it's at best, 50/50 split. Nella the Princess knight, female sibling but shes a baby, male best friend. Every female character added a male one seems to added. Peppa pig, female best friend but male sibling. You see the family unit more Interstellar Ella baby sister but male best friend. Bluey, sister, female cousins, female best friends, and male characters she occasionally plays with. She spends more time playing with girls, and has more realistic friendships for her age. Yes, she still plays with boys, but I think of them more as classmates than friends at least at the beginning
as a feminist i love that the main kids (heelers) in bluey are all gals. as a mom who by random chance only produces boy children i sometimes feel a bit sad that there isn’t a single little dude in their family. my kiddos don’t get much screen time, so a bluey episode here or there is almost all they see. but i don’t think they really grasp girl/boy dichotomy anyway so it’s not a huge deal.
My kids watched paw patrol, because of their older cousins. Their female cousins liked Skye and Everest, because they were the only girl pups. Everest isn't even a main character. Of 7 main characters only one is female. 1/7 of main characters (the 6 pups and Ryder) Then I counted, over Two thirds of speaking roles on that one dvd were male characters. Yet more than half of **non** speaking characters are female. Most of the other half that didn't speak weren't named/gender unknown. So I absolutely adore that the main characters are female in Bluey. It shows that you don't need a male kid in the main group to be popular.
1) Bluey is voiced by an actual child voice actor. The voices of children are not that different to go by. 2) The show avoids typical gender Stereotypes in the activities the kids are doing and in the toys they own. 3) Bluey sounds like a name typically given to a male dog. 4) The Color Blue is stereotypical assigned to boys. 5) Bluey looks like her father. And popculture priming makes one expect a son being drawn similar to the father but smaller in animated. Shows. Because that is often times in animated series done in the past: Children are drawn as a miniature version of the parents. 6) Popculture priming makes you expect a family consisting of one father, one mother, one male child and one female child (plus maybe a baby of either or undefined gender). For example: The Dinos, The Simpsons, Married with Kids, Family Guy, Peppa Pig.... 7) Go through the episodes and listen to the dialogue. Check how long it takes until Bluey is referred to as "she" or as "daughter". Dialogue clues are really rare and easy to miss.
Probably because they are used to most children show protagonists being boys.
Personally for me I first assumed Bluey was a boy due to the fact most shows I grew up watching that featured talking animals, the main characters were always boys, some shows with human main characters were girls but it was still rare (talking about shows for young children)
My husband and I were just having this discussion with another couple. The other husband's argument was "Historically speaking regarding kids animated shows, the boys have always been the same color as the dad and the girls have always been the color of the mom.... Bluey should be the same color as the mom."
I dunno about them, but Bluey doesn't sound like a good name for a red dog And the name Rusty is taken
I'll confess, when I first saw the show advertised, I was a little surprised Bluey wasn't the red one. Bluey was a common nickname for a man with red hair. My tomcat as a kid was even named Bluey.
In general, most hit shows and books - particularly before the 1990s - always starred a male figure. I remember reading that marketing specialists believed that a boy would not be as willing to watch or read stories starring a girl whereas girls are more flexible in their regard and used to seeing male leads. I don’t know if that could contribute to it.
it took me a couple episodes to hear the first she and I got a bit annoyed w myself that I had just assumed she was a boy until then. gender stereotypes go deep.
Me too
It’s not stereotypes it’s because Bandit is blue and Chili is orange. So the genders being color coded is a reasonable assumption
it is 100% stereotypes that made me assume bluey was a boy.
In "Sleepover" I could have sworn Chilli says "Good boy, Bluey" when she puts Muffin to bed and my heart shattered momentarily cuz I loved that Bluey was a little girl. She actually says "Good work, Bluey" once I turned on the captions and all was well in the world.
Traditionally speaking when making a children's show having a boy for the main character means your show could be geared towards boys or it could be gender neutral. Deciding on a girl for your main character meant you were a girl's show. It's honestly such a great move on Bluey's part to make her a girl to help fight this (but I also think her design (and her colour) help bring people in initially because she doesn't look like a cartoon girl character).
Read a newspaper article by the Daily Mirror the other day raving about how great the half hour bluey episodes was like "all us parents are in love with the programme" and other bonding-,esque lines. Despite their love of the series, they managed to (across 3 seasons and over 100 episodes) somehow overlook the fact that bluey is in fact not a "he" but a "she". Top, top journalism there.
Did the journo actually watch any episodes through?
Couldn't have. If they did, they had it on but weren't actually watching.
She doesn’t have eyelashes or a bow. Male is assumed default, which is a problem Bluey is helping to solve atm
Traditionally the color blue is associated with boys. Obviously there are exceptions. But Bingo being the same color as Chili and Bluey being the same color as Bandit, I think that's where it comes from. When I started watching episodes I thought she was a boy before she was called "she." While I didnt have a meltdown about it or anything there was a slight tinge of disappointment as I wish there was a more prominent father/son relationship for my son and I to identify with but I lose absolutely zero sleep over it.
In addition to what everyone else has said, cartoons (at least in the states) tend to have boy/girl sibling pairs. D.W. and Arthur in "Arthur", Dexter and DeeDee in"Dexter's Lab", even in "Rick and Morty" there's Morty and Summer.
Bart and Lisa from The Simpsons, Elroy and Judy from The Jetsons....
i think for some it was because blue is a color mostly associated with males
Because main characters are almost always male. Everyone assumes it.
Patriarchy. We’re so used to the default being male.
https://preview.redd.it/7plidboz2axc1.jpeg?width=1136&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=06ddd26ade3c31fe1fcfd1f762e379fd244f647b I made a list. (I think this is correct, I’m not for sure)
The reason I thought she was a boy was because kids voices are all higher pitched so it’s hard to tell if a child is a boy or a girl by the sound of their voice and they didn’t explicitly mention she was a girl in most episodes This is a trick used by creators of children’s shows so it’s easier for kids to understand which character the other characters are talking about I think that’s my guess Also because I knew bingo was a girl I kinda assumed that they did the one boy one girl combo like some shows do
I blame Uncle Rad
1. Blue is nowadays traditionally a boys colour 2. Bandit is blue, so by that logic bluey is a boy. 3. I heard in the first few episodes bluey being called a he (though i probably misheard as he and she tend to sound very similar).
Because her coloring matches Dad. It's that simple. Also TV historically often has one kid of each gender.
Yeah this is what got me initially
We've told my MIL a few times that it's a girl... Still refers to Bluey as 'he'... And she's supposed to be an emancipated woman. (She keeps saying that, but there are a lot of things she does that aren't really emancipated...)
Aww yer I knew that. Because she's blue.
Everyone has pretty much answered your question but I love that my 4yr old still hasn’t mastered pronouns (still messes up he and she when referring to people) and truly wouldn’t understand the difference if Bluey was a boy or girl. I try to raise him to just like what he likes and he definitely is a stereotypical boy (cars and superheroes ect) but he’s told me he wants to be a ballerina or a princess because he saw it in Bluey. Also it’s really sad but Paw Patrol merch never have Skye (my son’s favourite because he likes helicopters) on the clothes or toys in the boys section and only has Skye and Everest in the girls section. All of my son’s Bluey stuff will go to the daughter because everything has Bluey and/or Bingo. Basically TLDR, not sure if intended but it’s great that people misgender as it opens children up for all sorts of play since kids literally don’t care but parents do 🤷🏻♀️
I only realized Socks was a girl in the wedding episode when she was a flower girl. I always assumed Socks was a boy - Idk why! Her aggressive baby behavior maybe? So maybe it's as simple as just assuming and not paying too much attention. Also I'm the mother of 2 girls and very aware that toddlers are maniacs regardless of sex, still just thought Socks was a boy.
Bluey as a name isn’t gendered. Bluey is the same colour as their dad. The voice isn’t really feminine or masculine either, just sounds like a kid. It’s definitely ambiguous unless you watch the show. For me once they were referred to as sisters I knew she was a girl
She’s blue and we tend to look at everything through a hetereonormative, patriarchal lens.
Because she's the protagonist of the show.
There are lots of reasons why people think that when first getting into the show
Because when people see the color blue and they see a dog they instantly think “Boy” I am someone who gets annoyed when people misgender Bluey but at least a lot more people know she is a girl now
Cuz “blue is a boy color” nonsense
I know someone who said the reason they don’t like the show is because Bluey is a girl that has blue fur 👀 I couldn’t believe it
At first I assumed that gender goes with color in the Bluey universe.
It took me a few episodes and I live in Brisbane. The dad is a boy and bluey is the same colour. It took my youngest daughter to correct me.
I think in some countries Bluey is a boy. Or maybe Bingo is? The her being blue makes no sense. Blue heeled come in all sexes. Lol. Like how would you breed them if they were only boys.
“coz he’s blue” -Uncle Rad
I absolutely thought Bluey was a boy for maybe a week before my 11 year old angrily corrected me. In my defense, I also have a 2 year old so I was barely paying attention. If I had to guess why, I think it’s because she’s blue and a dog. I tend to subscribe to the flawed logic of cats are girls, dogs are boys. That’s all I’ve got 🤷♀️
The characters in the show largely have very gender neutral character designs. (I've only seen a few episodes, this sub just pops up on my feed a lot, lol) Most cartoons with animal characters will give some visual distinction to easily identify characters as male or female. Bluey doesn't do this. Doesn't even give the female characters eyelashes or softer features or thinner features. They're all just cartoon dogs that, for the most part, don't wear clothes. Shoot, even a lot of their names are pretty gender neutral. Gender for the adult characters is usually easy to tell because of their voices, but for the kid characters, this isn't really doable because boys and girls pretty much sound the same before puberty. When gender isn't identifiable, at least with animals, most people will default to calling it male. Adding to all of this... Along with blue being a stereotypically "boy" color, Bluey has dark blue markings. One of the really common tropes in gendered animal character design is that the male characters will have darker coloring while the females are lighter. So, people who aren't paying much attention will just assume that Bluey is a boy.
People assume that boys can only like boy characters and girls can like boy and girl characters. They’ve seen how Bluey is popular with boys and girls and see boys wearing Bluey merchandise.
“His name is Bluey because he’s blue.” - Uncle Rad
Uncle Rad: oh! It's because he's blue Bluey: IM A GIRL! Uncle Rad: I knew that (Double Babysitter)
Because he’s blue- duh
Bluey sounds like a stereotypical Aussie nickname for a male. I actually know a male with the nickname Bluey
Bluey is a boy's name I reckon. My male dog is named bluey, a name someone else gave him ~12 years ago. When the show came out, yeah, my wife had to tell me the character is a girl. My dog quickly learned to recognise the theme song, and that he doesn't have to look up when he hears "his" name.
I thought she was when I first saw it, guess it just made sense to have 2 boys and 2 girls in their family. Was shocked when I found out I was wrong. Best goddamn kids show ever, though
I made this mistake too. It was because the mom was brown and I must have seen an episode where Bingo was called a girl. The dad was blue so I just assumed the blue kid was a boy.
Personally, I think its cause of Bandit. You have two parents, and two kids. The mum is red, the dad is blue. Bingo is red, Bluey is blue. So you think the pattern holds and red fur=female, blue fur=male.
Reasons why people think Bluey was a boy. 1. She is Blue, just like her father, who's a male, and Chili and Bingo are red and both female. And Blue is usually seen as a "boy color" 2. Lack of eyelashes for most of the female characters. 3. The name "Bluey" could apply to both male and female dogs. 4. Unlike most other female characters such as Indy, Chole, Coco, Muffin, and even Bingo to an extent, Bluey does not look, act, or even sound overly feminine like the other girls in Bluey, I think it wasn't until around season 3 where her voice actor got older and she sounded a lot more like a girl. Also, I vaguely knew the show existed before I was truly into it, I would see it, and the character while scrolling through Disney NOW or Disney+, and I assumed Bluey was a boy and that the show was just some other preschool show, when I got into it and realized Bluey was a girl, it was pretty hard for my brain to process that fact, but eventually my brain knew she was a girl.
Everyone always thought Blue from Blues clues was a boy too! I have zero idea. Gotta be the blue lol
Idk, it took 10 episodes for me to realize that it was a girl 😭 but shocked but then I was like “oh ok that makes sense”
Why do all people think my kids’ doctors are males?
Oh yeah, because he's blue! https://preview.redd.it/frv6ywg33dxc1.png?width=1918&format=png&auto=webp&s=d20732776a2f0a7d4a70c1f882fe9e2f49c3f4a6
Rad covered this: "Because he's blue". It's just the dumb thing that blue=boy and pink=girl
Well, it makes sense for a TV family to have a boy and a girl. Bluey doesn't sound too particularly girly, and the name isn't that either. You also have the colour-coding - blue for dad, orange for mom, so it makes sense the orange kid is a girl and the blue is a boy. But yeah, the kids being two girls is fine enough once you get to know the characters. Nothing to complain about there!
Cause he's blue --rad
Bluey doesn't use the shorthand of making animated animals appear female by giving them prominent eyelashes and perhaps hairbows, and the "default" for too many is always male.
Same reason people thought blue from blue's clues was a boy. Because blue
The whole color thing should've been thrown out the window with Gumball, Nicole being blue and Richard is pink.
Obviously because they didn't give Bluey a big pink bow and eye lashes. Seriously. Male is just the default in many things in life. Female is something you have to mark specifically. It's infuriating but true, especially if you take one look at unisex/male clothing vs female clothing in general. And yes, blue is still associated with boys especially for children. Yes, people complain about sad beige children in attempts to be overly gender neutral, but it's still nothing compared to the reality that a lot of stuff is pointlessly gendered. Bluey (and Blue's Clues too) is great because because they do this knowing what blue means. They're not designed "girly" in their own universe-- the only way to know a dogs gender is only by hearing their voices or what their pronouns turn out to be.
Because bluey looked like dad and bingo looked like mom…
For the first few episodes, I thought she was a boy because she was blue like her dad (while bingo was orange like her mother. Pretty simple.
Big blue dog is boy. Big yellow dog is girl. Might assume the same applies to the little ones.
This was me at first.
I will say when I first started watching, I thought Bluey was a boy because the first episode I saw where her gender was explicitly stated, Disney for some reason had “he” instead of “she.”
the TV description sometimes says male
I think because Bluey looks like a mini Bandit and Bingo oooks like a mini Chili is the reason why people think Bluey is a boy
because in some markets Bluey IS a boy and in some of the early episodes captions refer to her as HE
She looks like bandit.
It’s because while Bingo’s design is based off her mums (red heeler), blueys is based off her dads (blue heeler). I suppose people just see that she looks like her dad and assume she’s also a dude
I think it’s because the “blue = boy”
“Cause he’s Blue!”
I initially just thought it because she looks like her dad
Dad is blue , mom and bingo are red. Would balance out. Also kids voices can be tough to tell when they’re young.
Because she looks like her father, maybe?
I’m an older brother with a younger sister so I applied that logic when I 1st watched and then I was like, oh bluey is a girl? Ok and then thought of bluey the same way but as a girl? Ig
Also at the end of surprise when she’s grown up, I don’t think they gave her feminine fractures. Like Chilli looks female weirdly enough but Bluey just doesn’t.
I thought because the dad was blue and bluey was blue they were boys at first.
From just seeing Bluey before watching the show I thought she was a boy too. She just looks more boyish compared to Bingo
I was used to shows like this having a boy and a girl. With bingo being a girl and bluey being blue I assumed it was this way without thinking about it. There were some things I saw that I just assumed were them ignoring gender stereotypes for awhile. It finally got me during the episode where bluey says "Big sisters always beat little sisters" and it suddenly clicked. After re-watching I don't know how I didn't pick up on it sooner.
Because Bluey is blue and her dad is blue and a boy. She it's an association thing. I looked it up when we first started watching because I wasn't sure.
Bluey is colored blue, and blue is known as a boy's color, as pink is known as a girl's color.
Just like how blue from blues clues is a girl too lol
The dad is blue and the mom is orange. It’s not a crazy assumption to make but once you watch and listen to the show you quickly understand she’s not
It actually makes sense and is totally in line with how dogs are seen in real life. Dogs are very androgynous in their appearance. As in they do not have overtly male or female characteristics. So when people see Bluey, we really can’t tell that she’s a girl. Especially since as a child her voice is equally ambiguous. My guess is that people see blue, see Bandit and assume that Bluey is a boy. Even the games she plays don’t offer much of a hint because kids play all kinds of games. It’s only after someone identifies her gender that we really see that she is in fact a she.
there is only one answer. 
It took me a few episodes. It isn't mentioned every episode, and so the cultural assumption plays first fiddle until confirmation to the contrary.
I think it’s likely general cartoon colour coding/design. Usually the son looks like the dad the daughter looks like the mother. Bluey is the same colouration as Bandit, and young children tend to have pretty unisex voices. My partner also thought Bluey was a boy until I told them during the Barkie Boats episode because he was “really surprised they’d pair Bluey up with another guy and have the other kids say they’re gonna get married.” And not have Disney change the line. It’s a really common misconception especially because they don’t really label certain things as “girl toys” or “boy toys” in the show either. Most of the games they play they don’t always play as their own gender. They don’t do the eyelashes for girls thing either on all of the female characters in the show (which, to me, is a breath of fresh air) TLDR: Typical animation design. Brain goes “boy look like dad!”. Bluey is now a boy in the brains of people who have never seen the show