Gender in My Little Pony

Gender is a complicated topic that can't be summed up on an article on a My Little Pony wiki. In the franchise, most characters can be confidently labeled as males or females, including many individuals who are not biological entities, such as robots or spirits, as they often identify as one or the other. Many events and organizations are heavily gendered.

My Little Pony and gender
As horses have traditionally been associated with girls, My Little Pony too quickly became marketed towards girls in the 1980s. Despite this, the creator of the franchise, Bonnie Zacherle intended the original My Pretty Pony toy to appear to boys as well, a sentiment followed up by Lauren Faust, show runner of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Despite this, branding for the toyline was unambiguously feminine until 2016, when the current logo of the brand was changed from a girlish pink to a neutral blue.

Male characters in the franchise was relatively barren until Friendship is Magic diversified the cast. The only recurring males in My Little Pony were, and The Moochick though, many episodes had one-off males, typically as princes, kings or knights. Most antongists of the show were males, but numerous heroic (or mostly heroic) males would also appear, most notably Alonzo, Garth and Philip. Stallions were even rarer, with most stallions being 'Big Brother Ponies' and thus were often not around, though the odd non-brother stallion would sometimes show up, such as Knight Shade.