Is my cat male or female?

This is a stupid question, but can someone confirm for me whether my cat is male or female? I have attached a picture of their genital area at the end of this message (apologies for the flaky bum). Yesterday, our vet surprised us at a check up by telling us our cat is male, when we have spent 2 years thinking our cat is female! To give context, we adopted our cat 2 years ago at 3/4 years old from a rescue centre who told us she was female, and as there was limited info about her from the previous owner, she had to undergo exploratory surgery prior to adoption to check on her ovary area and that she had been neutered. The rescue centre even spoke with us about how it’s more difficult to tell whether females have been neutered so the surgery was unfortunately necessary. The vets confirmed she had been neutered previously following this surgery, so those vets must also had been pretty convinced our cat was female at this point. 2 years of regular vet appointments have followed where several different vets have referred to our cat as female, until one vet took a look yesterday. Now we have done some googling, we can see our cat’s downstairs looks maybe more male than female… but we are just a bit confused and would like some professional confirmation on whether the vet yesterday was correct. Many thanks in advance for your help

Hello!   It is potentially difficult to sex a cat from a photograph and please do not take anything we say as absolute, etc etc etc, but this looks like a neutered Tom to me.   Did they have a microchip done at the same time?  - as this would be a good way to tell whether it is indeed the same cat! I wonder if your cat is a tortoiseshell or tabby?  Genetically, tortoiseshells tend to be female and tabbies tend to be males (coat pattern is genetically sex linked) but there are male tortoiseshells, which tend to be infertile. Thankyou for sharing this interesting case!

Hello!   It is potentially difficult to sex a cat from a photograph and please do not take anything we say as absolute, etc etc etc, but this looks like a neutered Tom to me.   Did they have a microchip done at the same time?  - as this would be a good way to tell whether it is indeed the same cat! I wonder if your cat is a tortoiseshell or tabby?  Genetically, tortoiseshells tend to be female and tabbies tend to be males (coat pattern is genetically sex linked) but there are male tortoiseshells, which tend to be infertile. Thankyou for sharing this interesting case!

Hi Liz, thank you so much for getting back to me. That is really helpful. That is a good point about double checking their microchip. I will look into this, though I am pretty much 100% sure it is the same cat - he has very distinctive asymmetrical patterning on his face. I am going to get in touch with the rescue centre too just to check over their records, but our cat definitely first came to us with a healing scar from the exploratory surgery I mentioned. We are still getting our heads around it! As for your question about his patterning, I would say that our cat is alike to a tabby and white, though he does have gingery patches on his legs and tail so I have wondered if he his also a bit of a tricolour/calico. Thanks again!