Meet the world’s first ‘gender-neutral’ cat born with no sexual organs
Joe Pinkstone
Tue, 8 November 2022 at 6:43 pm·2-min read
Hope kitten gender-neutral cat - Cats Protection/PA Wire
A kitten born without any sexual organs has been discovered in what vets think may be a world first.
Hope was part of an abandoned litter which made its way into the care of the Cats Protection Tyneside adoption centre, and regulation checks from vets revealed they were not noticeably male or female.
Hermaphrodite felines are rare but do occur, but there is no known documented case of a cat with no genitals.
Fiona Brockbank, the senior field veterinary officer at Cats Protection, told The Telegraph: “It was an incidental finding. Nobody was aware of it. Hope came into care like all other cats who get relinquished and at the point that she had her vet check, underneath her tail just did not look as we would expect for either of the sexes.
“Hope didn’t have any external sexual organs, and on the operation to look internally, there were no internal sexual organs.”
Dr Brockbank added that she has been unable to find anything in scientific literature about a cat born with no sexual organs.
Hope gender-neutral cat - Cats Protection/PA Wire
But despite her unique anatomy, Hope had no issues going to the toilet and has now been adopted by Jessi Bennett, a student at Newcastle University who is studying a Master’s in animal behaviour, did a dissertation on cat genetics and works part-time at Cats Protection.
There has been no genetic analysis done on the kitten, who was initially called Hope but has since been renamed by Ms Bennett as Beans.
Ms Bennett told The Telegraph that she was looking for an energetic kitten to keep her other cat, Morbius, company – and the 15-week-old Beans was a perfect match.
“I thought we would be a great match but I didn’t realise the rarity of what they had,” she said. “We did know about it, but we didn't realise that this was the first known case. I didn’t choose the cat based on that.”
She added that Beans is “very healthy and happy” and said she may run a genetic test in future, but it would be purely out of curiosity as opposed to benefit Beans’s health.
“We are quite happy having our little gender-neutral cat,” she said.
