Otto is a girl

Well. This one I did not see coming.

Otto is a girl.

We bought her as a male. I’ve written “he” about her on this website for months, in the very first journal entry, on the about page, everywhere. It was wrong. Not deliberately — just wrong, and now corrected.

I’m not going to pretend I spotted it cleverly. I didn’t — it became clear over time, and once it was clear there was no arguing with it. Sexing a young crested gecko is genuinely one of the things beginners get wrong, and it turns out I am a beginner. That’s fine. It’s the whole reason this journal exists.

What it actually means

It means Heart & Hatch currently has three females and no male at all.

Otto, Asta, Liva — all girls. So the plan I’ve been describing on this site, where Otto is paired with one of the girls, cannot happen. There’s nothing to pair them with.

So the search starts again, in the other direction: I’m looking for a male now. The same way I looked before — patiently, and only bringing one home when it’s genuinely the right animal rather than the first one that’s available. A good male matters even more than I thought it did.

That pushes our first homebred clutch further out, and I’d rather tell you that than let the timeline quietly imply otherwise. I’ve added the search for a male to the journey page as its own step, because that’s honestly where we are.

Two things this doesn’t change

She’s keeping the name. She’s Otto. She’s been Otto since the day she moved in and she is not going to be re-christened over a bit of anatomy.

And it changes nothing about lineage. I never had papers for Otto and never claimed any, so there’s no story here that needs unwinding — just a pronoun.

On leaving the old posts alone

I’ve left the earlier entries exactly as they were written, with a note at the top of each pointing here. It would have been easy to go back and change every “he” to “she” and let it look like I’d known all along. That’s not the deal I made with anyone reading this. The whole point of writing things down as they happen is that sometimes what happens is you were wrong.

None of this changes anything for the two hatchlings from the gifted clutch: still not from a pairing of ours, still no lineage to claim, still not for sale.

— raised with heart, by the breeder herself