I got this adorable, soft, fluffy, fuzzy stuffed animal today. It's so cute! Anyways, I guessed that it was a female. The thing is, I didn't do this based on the fact that it's wearing a pink ribbon... I did it based on the fact that it's a calico cat.
Calicos are predominantly female, since to have that coloration, a cat must possess two alleles which code for orange and black, and these are sex-linked, present on the X chromosome. Therefore a cat must have 2 X chromosomes to be a calico. The only way for a calico cat to be male is from nondisjunction, which ends up in the cat having the genotype XXY, known as Klinefelter syndrome in humans (characterized by a sterile male with underdeveloped male genitals and female attributes). Yeah. Not the pink ribbon, the biological explanation for the coloration. Oh, Mr. White...
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