kitten gender

Question
I feel stupid but I have never had a cat before and I recently adopted a 4 month old kitten.  They told me it was a male.  I rub its tummy but do not see anything "male" looking.  Can you tell the gender like you can with dogs?  I made an appointment for neutering, but, I may have a female.  Yeeks.

Answer
Hi Teresa.  You shouldn't feel stupid.  It's very difficult to tell the sex of kittens, and there are very many owners who drop their kittens off to have them altered and pick them up to find out they have to rename them, because they are not the sex they believed!  It is possible to tell the gender externally, but cats don't look the same anatomically as dogs.  You won't find anything in the groin area of a male cat.  Instead, you'll have to look at the anal area, just as you would a female.  To make things a even more difficult, a cat's penis fully retracts into a sheath, so you will barely even see a lump - simply a small, round opening about half an inch below the anus in a 4-month old kitten.  Between the two openings, you should see a fuzzy pouch of skin - the scrotum.  If you find only the anus and immediately below it a slit-like opening, you have a female.  Some people put it like this - when you're looking at the anus and the genitals, males look like colons and females look like upside down exclamation points.  Here is a site with a couple of good pictures.  These kittens are a little younger than yours, but it might give you a better idea.

http://www.vetmed.wsu.edu/clientED/kittengender.aspx