I’m trying to get a more detailed understanding of the conventions for depicting gender and sex assignment in furry art – with the intention of finding ways to expand and/or subvert them. Naturally these are going to vary by artist, style, and clique, and there is plenty of room for small-scale exceptions; but I’m compiling here some general trends I’ve learned in honing my art, and I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts.
Anthropomorphic characters rely on an idealized secondary sexual dimorphism as the primary symbol for gender. Among these traits, the most important ones are (loosely in order) the presence or absence of breasts, hip-to-shoulder ratio, other body fat distribution (apart from breasts), height, distribution of body hair (where coarser or darker fur corresponds to hair and smooth, form-fitting, or light-colored fur corresponds to bare skin), and muscle definition. Facial characteristics can be complicated by the combination of human and animal characteristics, but the size and severity of features (particularly snout/nose and where applicable the chin), also function as sex/gender characteristics. Where they’re shown, primary sex characteristics, i.e., genitalia, tend to make no statement on gender, only on sex.
Characters that are more stylized or zoomorphic (or otherwise inhuman) tend to more closely follow a convention that’s been in continuous and widespread use since the early days of cartoons. I typically summarize it as “Boy until proven girl.” Where a male character doesn’t need any traits to explicitly display that he’s male; but a female character must have traits demonstrating that she’s female.
Anthropomorphic and stylized characters, of course, aren’t mutually exclusive categories. Most characters and art styles employ a mix of both approaches to depicting gender.
Dress and grooming play a role in communicating characters’ gender, though I find this is less important than physical dimorphism. Makeup – or the appearance of makeup – is a major way of indicating that a character is female, primarily long thick eyelashes, but also blush or full red/pink lips. Long hair can make a character seem more masculine or feminine depending on how it’s styled, but I find that any uncertainty with long hair errs on the side of femininity. And characters can of course wear clothing or accessories associated with a gender.
Stylization and exaggeration provide very important gender symbols. Sex characteristics are very often made more prominent than is realistically typical, especially if it serves to make the character more attractive. In female characters, this occurs particularly in the breasts, face, and hips/waist. Female characters are also often given more youthful-looking traits, particularly larger, rounder, and shinier eyes. Many male characters are given large and highly chiseled muscles, particularly the pecs and abs. Female characters are often drawn using more curved lines and round shapes, whereas male characters are drawn with more straight lines, angles, and squares.
There aren’t many strongly defined conventions for depicting androgyny. Many nonbinary characters I have seen are youthful-looking, thin, flat-chested, with short hair and facial piercings. I’ve also seen some artists employ heavier use of male symbols on their male characters to lessen the “boy until proven girl” effect in context. Most often, a caption or description must be used to explicitly label a character as nonbinary. There are some widespread tropes of characters that mix masculine and feminine symbols, for example the “femboy” or the dominatrix. These tend to have a fairly rigid recipe and connotations, and are not usually associated with nonbinary genders.
