I haven’t talked much about Grimm (aka “Evil Cat”) before, because part of Grimm’s role is their creepy mysteriousness.  But lately there’s been some discussion about Grimm’s gender, and I wanted to clarify a few things!  Namely, why Catharine refers to Grimm as “they.”

The reason is that Grimm doesn’t have a sex or gender identity, unless Grimm is actually possessing someone else’s body.  I suppose that means Grimm themself is genderfluid.  For reasons that will be explained later in the comic, Grimm isn’t a regular cat. (Although I’m sure the readers must have noticed that already.)  Grimm is rather a magical being whose “default” form is a cat.

So when Grimm is referred to on their own, they are genderless.  When Grimm is possessing someone else, they take on their gender pronouns. (In the latest page, Claire refers to GrimmPossessed!Catharine (who I refer to as “Sister Cat”) as “she.”

This is also the reason I’ve had Catharine refer to Grimm as “they” rather than “it,” because Grimm is more than a feral animal, and referring to them as such would be dehumanizing.  I considered having her use other gender-neutral pronouns (such as  ‘sie’, ‘hir’, ‘ey’, ‘zie’ etc.) but I thought the majority of readers would mistake it for a typo, and/or it would throw the reader out of the narrative (since Grimm’s gender wasn’t the focus of that dialogue.)

However, given my recent poll on the site, I was pleasantly surprised to se that I have a relatively large proportion of non-binary readers. (At the time of writing, 14%!)  This makes me really happy, because I am planning to write in more non-binary characters! (And I promise, they won’t all be “evil,” although nobody in my story really is.)