How Can I Tell If My Cat's 3-Week-Old Kittens Are Girls Or Boys?

How can you tell the gender of a kitten?

At three weeks old, it should be rather simple to tell what gender your kittens are. The only problem I can foresee is that of the little guys wriggling out of your hands!

In general, there are two basic rules for establishing the sex of a three-week-old kitten:

• The male's urethral opening, which is located in between its back legs, will have a round opening.
• The female's urethral opening will be more of a slit-shape, rather than a round hole.

If you cannot tell the gender of the kittens this way, then you should be able to tell from the distance between the kitten's anus and its urethral opening.

• In the male kitten, this distance should be greater, if you compare a male to a female kitten. In the female, there is a shorter distance between the kitten's anus and its urethral opening.

It should be easy to see these differences until the kitten is about six weeks old. When the kitten is older than this, the growth of fur in the genital and anal regions will make it more difficult to see the different shapes of the urethral opening.