A Complete History of Birdo’s Gender

One of the biggest gaming news stories in early 2023 was the release of a certain wizard-themed RPG. Because the creator of this franchise has obstinately bigoted opinions about trans people, writers and readers of gaming news had opinions on how this particular title should be discussed. The Switch would not get its version of the game until November 2023, but while this industry-wide debate was happening, Nintendo celebrated March 10, Mario Day, with new DLC courses for Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

Included in this news, however, was the announcement that Birdo would be making her long-awaited return to the game’s roster of playable racers.

A pink, egg-spitting dinosaur who was introduced as “a boy who thinks he’s a girl,” Birdo had been missing from the series since Mario Kart Wii, and while Nintendo had promised additional Mario Kart 8 courses, the promise of new characters was a surprise. The fact that the first of the new racers was Birdo meant that Nintendo had not, in fact, forgotten about this character, who has long been recognized as being… if not canonically transgender, then somehow trans-adjacent. But if you do consider Birdo to be trans, then she’s the first-ever trans character in a video game.

Because Birdo’s return was announced amid all this talk about transphobia, I wanted to consider this as Nintendo saying “trans rights,” but to interpret Birdo’s return as some kind of rejoinder to the wizard RPG discussion gives Nintendo too much credit. Not only has the company inconsistently gendered Birdo in both in English and the original Japanese, but also it’s never taken much of a stand in saying “yes, she is” or “no, she isn’t.” In fact, I would have bet that Nintendo was incapable of taking any such stance in an English-language version of any game, but that changed in May 2024, with the translation of the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door. Vivian, a character in this game, was overtly written as trans in this new English version, whereas the previous English translation omitted all the references the original Japanese version made to her gender being anything other than cisgender female.

As a gay man who’s played video games his whole life and who’s always been interested in how the medium portrays gender and sexuality, I was shocked that Nintendo had opted to allow Vivian to be trans.

This change also made me think back to Birdo and Nintendo’s position on her gender. Depending on how critical you’re feeling, that position could be described as evolving, ambivalent or just generally inconsistent. On one hand, no, Nintendo has never confirmed that Birdo is canonically trans, despite all the evidence I’m gathering for this post that would suggest this is the case. That may be in part because Western or even specifically American concepts of gender and sexuality don’t necessarily line up with ones used in Japan — now or back in the 1980s, when Birdo debuted, and this is something I will be discussing through this piece. On the other hand, it would also be an oversimplification to say that Nintendo’s English-language materials just decided at some point to refer to Birdo using feminine pronouns and dropped any reference to the “boy who thinks he’s a girl” backstory, because it’s never completely gone away. Occasionally, the English version of Mario games offer vague hints that Birdo is something other than a cisgender female character, and I thought it would be interesting to track that evolution, from her debut outside the franchise in Doki Doki Panic to today.

So as near as I can piece together, here is the complete history of how Nintendo has represented Birdo’s gender — in English and Japanese. And if it’s not complete, it’s as close to that as anyone has ever made, and I’m happy to update and amend it as I find anything else that warrants inclusion.

Note: I’ve divided Birdo’s history by the various Nintendo consoles. There are quite a few appearances I don’t mention specifically because to my knowledge they didn’t say much interesting about her gender. Not every sports title appearance needs a shout out, I figured. Of course, if I’ve overlooked something, let me know and I’ll add it in.

The NES Years

The complicated story of how Birdo became a character you can race as in a Mario Kart game begins with Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic, the platforming game Nintendo produced to promote a Fuji TV event in the summer of 1987. Famously, that game ended up being remade with Super Mario characters and released outside Japan as Super Mario Bros. 2 in 1988. (For more information on Yume Yume Kōjō as well as why the Western SMB2 is missing a level, read my post here.)

Top: The box art for Doki Doki Panic. Note the rare depiction of the orange, closed-snout Birdo. Bottom: The box art for its remake, Super Mario USA, which seems to consciously re-create the Doki Doki Panic art, with every visual aspect being more or less in the same place without the drawing having been traced or reproduced. They went through the trouble of redrawing it all to look the same.

In either version of the game, Birdo functions the same: She’s a dinosaur-looking boss blocking the exit goal in many stages, and to defeat her you have to throw the eggs she spits back in her face. Here, watch Lina take on Birdo in the original Doki Doki Panic.

In addition to functioning the same in both games, Birdo is described more or less the same in the English and Japanese instruction manuals, with the principal difference being that in Japan, the character has always been named Catherine (キャサリン, Kyasarin). Furthermore, a quirk of the Japanese language is that it doesn’t use pronouns as often as other languages do, so the original Japanese description doesn’t explicitly identify this character as male, only implies it, whereas the English one is basically required to pick a pronoun and goes with he.

The Western name is arguably more gendered, because a lot of Western names that end with “o” are masculine, whereas ones that end in “a” are often feminine. (Case in point: Mario, as opposed to Maria.) Birdo is asking us to call her a more feminine name, but we’re apparently not accommodating her. It’s wild to consider how this introduction to Birdo lands in 2024, when it’s generally considered rude to call someone the incorrect name or to tell the they’re confused about their gender. Back in 1988, I guess we didn’t find it strange that the more feminine-sounding Birdetta is the name she wishes she had, but we’re just going to call her Birdo regardless.

Over the years Nintendo would more and more frequently just refer to Birdo with feminine pronouns and omit any reference to alleged gender confusion. The company has never explained this change, but I would guess that it probably results from Nintendo having decided that discussion of gender identity conflicts with the company's family-friendly public image, especially in the United States and especially regarding the Super Mario games, as they’re the most family-friendly of Nintendo’s most money-making franchises.

A side effect of this shift, however, is that Birdo’s story parallels the story of increasing trans acceptance in the West. Today, many people who in a previous decade might have misgendered and misnamed trans folks now realize that’s a shitty thing to do. At least among the progressive and considerate, and largely due to increased positive representation in the current era as well as the removal of transgender identity from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder in 2013, the language has shifted from “This person thinks they’re female” to just “They’re female.” This is where Birdo has ended up too, but again, I don’t want to give Nintendo too much credit here, because it’s very likely an accidental byproduct of the company declining to talk about one of the qualities that makes her special — and that endears her to queer fans especially.

Take, for example, the text written about her in the Nintendo Power Mario Mania publication, a 1991 strategy guide for Super Mario World that also featured a history of Super Mario games up until this point in time. Birdo is included, but the text avoids any mention of gender.

There is actually another instance of Birdo getting called the wrong name. The ending to Super Mario Bros. 2 features a sort of “credits” scroll of all the game’s characters, enemies included, but for some reason, Birdo’s name was switched with that of a generic, ostrich-like enemy in the game, Ostro. I suppose it makes sense? Birdo isn’t a bird (more on that in the miscellaneous notes), and Ostro is, so perhaps the name Birdo made more sense attached to an actual bird, even if it’s only one of several bird enemies in the game.

Weirdly, this kind of stuck. While later remakes of SMB2 would fix the mistake, some official Japanese documents still identify Birdo’s western name as Ostro.

Another reason this is notable, however, is the fact that Birdo more or less works as a proto-Yoshi, arriving in the Super Mario games years before Yoshi did. As I explain in greater detail in this post, Birdo and Yoshi are both bipedal dinosaurs who attack enemies using eggs. They both challenge gender norms — Birdo for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, Yoshi because he’s a male character who lays eggs. (Omitted from the English version, the Japanese text for the Yoshi trophy in Super Smash Bros. Melee actually says Yoshi are neither male nor female.) And while Yoshi entered the Super Mario games primarily as a beast of burden, it’s notable that the enemy character Birdo got confused with was also that, being the mount that Shy Guys rode in levels of SMB2.

It’s maybe ironic, then, that Yoshi pretty much shot right into the top tier of popular Mario characters and Birdo would only get her invite years later as a partner to Yoshi.

I’m ending this section with a Japanese TV commercial for Super Mario USA, which is the Japanese translation of the American version of Doki Doki Panic — which is to say a warmed-over repackaging of Doki Doki Panic with Mario characters. The ad stars Birdo, looking rather glam but speaking a voice that Fatimah, the translator with whom I worked on this project, describes as “a flamboyant, queer voice.” (“I’ve heard it with mostly AMAB characters who present themselves in a feminine manner,” she tells me.”)

Translation: “Well, hello there~ I’m Catherine. I play an enemy character in Super Mario USA. Whoops! You know, I was pretty popular in America. Now, I’ll play rea~l nice with my friends in Japan.” And then the announcer doesn’t say anything relevant about Birdo, followed by a remark by Birdo about having produced the egg: “Oh, dear, I did it~!”

Notably, Birdo uses the first person pronoun watashi (私), which is gender neutral, but she’s specifically using it in a way that codes as more feminine: “Watashi Kyasarin yo~” (私キャサリンよ~) instead of a more neutral alternative such as “Watashi wa Kyasarin desu” (私はキャサリンです。). In later instances, she’ll use other pronouns.

The Super NES Years

Before the North American release of Super Mario Bros. 3 in 1990, SMB2 imagery dominated Mario merchandise.

If you got Mario-themed paper plates, napkins, and party hats for your birthday — and I did, because that’s the kind of kid I was — you saw less of Mario chucking fireballs at turtles and more of him clutching vegetables and squaring off against the likes of Birdo. The spotlight did not last, however, and when SMB3 ditched most enemies, items, and gameplay concepts central to SMB2, Birdo went with them. (There was a single enemy that made the cut, actually.) She subsequently languished in lesser spinoffs such as Wario’s Woods, and she didn’t make the cut for Super Mario Kart, which featured the princess as the sole female playable character, a role she’d own for some time.

For what it’s worth, Birdo is prominently displayed in the title screen for 1993’s Super Mario All-Stars, a collection of 16-bit ports of the four original 8-bit adventures, as well as the remake that included Super Mario World.

The Japanese commercial for the game features her all dressed up for a Hollywood-style premiere, in a way that both calls back to her Super Mario USA commercial but also kinda-sorta elevates her to the same level as Peach, style-wise.

The next time Birdo makes a notable appearance is 1996’s Super Mario RPG, where she’s one of the many bird-like creatures working for the female villain, Valentina. (BTW, I have a whole separate post about Valentina and whether she’s meant to be a reference to the music of Jimmy Buffet. It’s complicated!) It’s the first time Birdo would speak in a game, and it would set a precedent for the Japanese version to be more explicitly flirty than the English version. In general, Birdo is more flirtatious than most any other female character in a Mario game, and I think she’s written this way because to an extent it’s supposed to be a joke: Birdo is a villain, more or less; and she’s strange-looking monster with a bazooka beak, and finally she’s not a cisgender female, and these three factors together make it so that we’re meant to understand that her flirting is unwanted. This should be considered in the larger context of Japanese pop culture at the time. As stated on the blog Ottomejuku, most trans people featured on TV were specifically trans women who were portrayed as man-hungry comedians who wear “gaudy makeup and flashy clothes,” and this fits Birdo to a T. (Pun intended?)

By comparing Birdo’s dialogue in Super Mario RPG, you can really see how the Japanese version is going for a broader, bigger characterization.

Here are all the dialogue cues in the original English version:

Upon checking the shell before the fight: I’m so… lonely. Will you play with me?
If Mallow checks Birdo’s status while she is still inside her shell: Slow down!
Upon emerging from the shell: I’m Birdo
If Mallow checks Birdo’s status once she hatches: I just love life!
After taking a certain amount of damage: Tee, hee! Ouch, you’re hurting me! Now it’s my turn! Get it while it’s hot!
Upon being defeated: Oh, I’m never gonna let you go. You’re just too… CUTE!
After the fight: Don’t forget about me!

The English text in the remake is basically the same, with the first line being punctuated with a heart symbol. The Japanese version of this dialogue gives her a lot more personality — and perhaps unsurprisingly, it makes it clearer that she’s flirting with you. (Fatimah specifies that this version of Birdo is given “a rather flamboyant speech style.”)

Upon checking the shell before the fight: I’m lonely… Won’t you play with me?
If Mallow checks Birdo’s status while she is still inside her shell: Don’t get flustered, now <3
Upon emerging from the shell: Hi~ <3 I’m Catherine. You can call me Cathy <3
If Mallow checks Birdo’s status once she hatches: Please, finish me yourself~ <3
After taking a certain amount of damage: Hehe... Don't fight so hard. You're the lonely type too, aren't you? <3 Fine, I'll give you my hot egg. Don't defend now <3
Upon being defeated: I'm a girl after your heart <3 When you're lonely, just think of me... If you do, I'll cheer you on~ <3" (Technically, she says “I’m your heart’s lover,” but Fatimah said “a girl after your heart” or “I’m the one for you” were the English phrases that more accurately conveyed this line.)
After the fight: Don’t forget about me!

The RPG outings generally give all characters more personality, and that is definitely the case for Birdo. But it’s always interesting how much the English versions turn down her volume, so to speak.

Birdo’s 16-bit era ends with BS Super Mario USA, a semi-sequel released for the Satellaview, a service that allowed Japanese players to download games to their Super Famicoms. This version of SMB2 featured new characters such as the King of Subcon, and while Birdo returns, she’s now part of the Birdo Trio, the other two being red and green variations that are apparently unique characters. (Birdo, like Yoshi and Toad, is simultaneously a singular character and an entire race of characters who look just like her.)

The game features voice acting — a lot of voice acting, honestly, to the point that it seems rather busy. According to the Mushroom Kingdom website, all three actresses who provided the Birdo voices — Jun Donna, Rika and Akemi — were performers at Shiroi Heya (“White Room”), a nightclub in Tokyo’s Shinjuku area that features newhalf performers. In fact, Shiroi Heya is thanked in the credits to BS Super Mario Bros. USA, and this connection might come as close as Nintendo has gotten to saying, “Yes, Birdo is trans.”

EDIT: After this poset went live, VGMuseum.com reach out on Twitter to point out that you can see what the Birdo actresses look like in the credits of the game, as all voice actors are pictured. You can see that here.

The Satellaview experience has your character navigating various games and services via a map screen that looks a great deal like Earthbound’s, and part of the BS Super Mario USA experience involved a special event called Birdo Dream House (キャサリン夢の館), which you entered via a building shaped like a particularly coquettish Birdo.

You enter through a door directly under her crotch. Given the focus of this piece, that seemed notable.

The Nintendo 64 Years

In order to give some of the more famous Mario characters doubles partners, the 2000 installment of Mario Tennis added a few new faces to the playable roster: Daisy (for Peach), Waluigi (for Wario), and Birdo, who was paired with Yoshi for the first time. Part of the reason I think Birdo has persisted as a playable character in these spinoff games is that she looks like she fits in with the established crew. For example, Daisy looks so much like Peach that she’s easily recognized as another princess. Waluigi looks like another variation on Mario’s basic design. Birdo predates Yoshi, but she looks so much like him that she could easily be read as a female version of him, even though that’s not the case.

The English manual for Mario Tennis just gives her female pronouns without getting into her personal life, while the Japanese version offers about as much info but without gendering her. This game also marked the first time we heard Birdo’s voice. She sounds a lot like Yoshi, just with a slightly higher pitch.

This Birdo voice was supplied by actress Jessica Chisum, and what’s interesting about it being so close to Yoshi’s voice is that shortly thereafter, Birdo’s voice would be performed by the actor who also does Yoshi, famed Nintendo composer Kazumi Totaka.

In 2001, however, Nintendo took a wild swing with voices in Super Mario Advance, yet another reworking of the 16-bit version of SMB2 features on Super Mario All-Stars. Famously, everyone in this game talks. In fact, they never shut up — Birdo included. In this game and this game only, Birdo is voiced by Jen Taylor, the longtime voice of Peach and Toad.

Sure, it’s weird, but I honestly sort of love it? Taylor is playing her like you’d imagine an English actor dubbing the “haughty, aristocratic woman” type character in an anime. I kind of wish Birdo had gotten an “o~hohohoho” laugh in there as well. But no, she’d never sound like this again, and Totaka’s “quacking” Birdo voice would be how she’d sound moving forward.

Voice notwithstanding, the English instruction manual entry for Birdo avoids any mention of the character’s gender. The one extra bit Birdo gets in this version of the game is that her original SMB2 sprite was finally given her trademark bow, which had previously been missing in pixel form. In fact, if you jump on her head, you can pick the bow up and throw it away.

That’s a real dick move, if you think about it.

The Gamecube Years

Birdo appears in Super Smash Bros. Melee as a hazard in the SMB2-themed stage, Mushroom Kingdom II, functioning more or less how she does in the game. As a result of this cameo, she gets a trophy. The Japanese text for the trophy description mentions the whole “thinks they’re a girl” thing, but the English one does not.

Given how the main gimmick of the Gamecube’s Mario Kart entry, Mario Kart: Double Dash!!, was characters racing with a partner, most of the characters kept their partners from the Nintendo 64 Mario Tennis. As a result, Birdo (and Daisy and Waluigi) made their debuts in a subfranchise that’s a lot closer to the mainline Mario games than, say, a Mario Party or a sports title. I don’t think there’s any reference in game to Birdo’s gender, but in looking around for official documents from the era, we did find an official Japanese Nintendo site that does note how Birdo’s gender might complicate her relationship with Yoshi.

Translation: Yoshi's girlfriend is actually their boyfriend?! They're off to the races with an egg in hand!"

Birdo is actually not playable in Mario Power Tennis, released in 2004. This makes for an interesting comparison point: Basically any spinoff game that features multiple characters lets you play as Waluigi and Daisy. Birdo? Not so much. And as other characters join the clique of recurring playable characters in these games, such as Rosalina, they seem to get precedence over Birdo, appearing more regularly as playable. She’s not wholly absent from the game, however. And if you win with Bowser in Mario Power Tennis, however, you do get a cut scene where a Birdo (if not *the* Birdo) makes an appearance, essentially to act as the butt of the joke.

The best possible reading of this scene is that Bowser is upset that he’s not getting a kiss from Peach. Knowing Birdo’s reputation — and figuring that characters existing in this world know it too — it should be pretty easy to see why this reads as transphobic in a way Nintendo might shy away from today. Of course, this is not the only instance of Birdo being treated as a sort of booby prize — unwanted or unappealing in a way that lets gamers in the know connect the dots. A good example of this same sort of treatment is actually the final game I’m mentioning in this era: the Game Boy Advance RPG Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, released in 2003.

Birdo appears throughout this game’s story as essentially a comic relief character, and there’s arguably a similar undercurrent to a plot point about Birdo disguising herself as Peach to foil the game’s big bad, Cackletta. An evil witch, Cackletta wants to steal Peach’s voice — and it seems she actually does, until her magic spell doesn’t work correctly specifically because she was duped into using Birdo’s unpleasant voice for Peach’s “pure” princess voice. This is a surprise to both Cackletta and the player, and it’s a decent plot twist, but there is a transphobic whiff to all of this, unfortunately. In the same way that Bowser feels when he realizes that Peach and Birdo have played a switcheroo on him, this whole scene — especially Birdo’s voice being such a poor substitute that it causes material damage — could be seen as goofier, video game manifestations of a recognized trope involving negative reactions to surprise gender reveals.

Later in the game, Birdo shows up as a partner of a recurring bad guy — Popple, a thief — and her allegiance to him seems to result from her being in love with him. It doesn’t end well, and the dysfunctional relationship between the two is featured again in the Nintendo 3DS remake side story, Minion Quest: The Search for Bowser.

The English script actually hews a lot closer to the original Japanese than we’ve seen before. For example, she addresses Popple consistently as “darling,” but it’s wholly unrequired on his end, and he pushes back every time she suggests there’s a romantic connection between them. The dialogue even calls back to the “he thinks he’s a girl” setup with Popple hesitating for a second when referring to her, saying “This, uh… dame passed my audition perfectly.” And in response, Birdo offers a new variation on her preferred name, telling Mario and Luigi, “Don’t call me Birdo… Call me Birdie!” The biggest difference is probably that in Japanese Birdo uses the casual feminine first-person pronoun atashi (あたし), which doesn’t have an equivalent in English but which makes it clear to Japanese players that this character is identifying herself as emphatically female.

Both versions end with Birdo, fired by Popple, declaring that she’s pursuing a career in show business, which is actually notable given the role she plays in subsequent RPGs.

The Wii Years

At long last, we come to a game that isn’t part of the Super Mario series and which could have been a post in and of itself: Captain Rainbow. Released only in Japan in 2008, Captain Rainbow is peak weird Nintendo. It has the player controlling a man named Nick who can transform into the superhero title character as he travels around an island populated by less famous Nintendo characters such as Lip from Panel de Pon, Takamaru from Mysterious Castle Murasame and Crazy Tracy from Link’s Awakening. Included among these weirdos is Birdo — redrawn to look very off-model in the way all the characters in this game are.

She’s also given a voice that sounds more like the one she had in the Super Mario USA commercial: flamboyant, sassy, somewhat masculine — gay or queer, perhaps? — and slightly more aggressive than we’ve heard before. In the Japanese text, she’s back to using the feminine pronoun atashi, but curiously it’s written not in hiragana (あたし) but in katakana (アタシ), which could be notable because katakana is primarily used for words of foreign origin. From Fatimah: “Within the context of this game, if I wanted to overthink it, I could say that it’s curious they wrote it in katakana because it can potentially signify that she’s speaking harshly or not lady-like and/or that it's something ‘foreign’?”

Each character has their own “quest” in which Nick needs to help them accomplish something, and in Birdo’s case it’s… kind of a lot, given the social climate when the game came out, given the social climate now and the history of Birdo’s gender. When Nick first runs into Birdo, who in this game calls herself “The Sexy Dynamite Monster,” she’s been jailed — and as she angrily explains to the player, this resulted from her being caught using the women’s restroom. The local police robot arrested her because he did not believe she was actually female and, in fact, calls her “a bundle of XY chromosomes” (XYセンショクタイノカタマリ). In order to free her, Nick needs to go to Birdo’s home and retrieve an object that proves she is female. While her very feminine-looking home is full of articles that a woman would typically use, the one item that you end up taking is found under Birdo’s pillow, and although the game does not explicitly say so, this object is implied to be a vibrator. It’s obscured by a question mark and only termed “proof of womanhood” (オンナの証) once in your inventory. Birdo celebrates freedom by declaring that Nick is her boyfriend now. Birdo blows a kiss, and it seems to injure Nick.

You can watch a fanmade English translation of this sequence below.

Now, Captain Rainbow did not sell especially well in Japan, so that’s likely the biggest factor in determining not to release it in any other territory. But even if it had been popular there, I wonder how an English localizer would have handled this sequence. Might it have been rewritten altogether? Captain Rainbow predates the first American bathroom bills by several years, but the passing of time since its release only makes Birdo’s storyline seem even stranger in a lighthearted game full of Nintendo nostalgia. What’s more, the fact that the problem gets solved with a vibrator, of all things, makes the game seem racier than Nintendo usually gets, especially in English-speaking territories.

All this awkwardness aside, I have to say that as a Birdo fan it’s a bummer that we never got Captain Rainbow outside Japan. It is one of the few games where Birdo — the only representative of the Super Mario series to get her own storyline, in fact — gets something interesting to do. And although I wouldn’t say it handles the subject matter well, exactly, it does at least acknowledge that her gender has been a subject of speculation since her first debuted in 1987 — and at that, it concludes by answering the longstanding mystery by saying “Yes, she’s female,” which is what she’s been telling us all along.

Captain Rainbow was not Birdo’s only appearance on the Wii, of course, but everything else seems lacking in comparison, at least as far as content for this essay. She gets another trophy in Super Smash Bros. Brawl, for example, and while the English text deems her “a pink creature of indeterminate gender,” which is actually a step further than the Japanese one does. In fact, this is the first time since SMB2 was released that an English-language Nintendo product explicitly discussed Birdo’s gender as being up for debate.

Squeaking in just one week before the release of the Wii U is Paper Mario: Sticker Star. A curious evolution of the Paper Mario series is that after The Thousand-Year Door, Nintendo stopped allowing versions of popular Mario enemies that had distinct personalities — for example, Goombario or Goombella, as opposed to regular old Goombas. Perhaps as a result of this rule, Birdo becomes a recurring character, because she’s a recurring enemy who canonically does have an individual personality. All of her appearances in this series play off the notion of her aspiring to be a performer.

In World 4-1, Mario can catch Birdo singing a short, cabaret-style song whose English lyrics explicitly talk about romance but implicitly hint at the vagaries of gender: “Heart of a woman, heart of a man… / Both can know of love's grace… / Just try not to get egg on your face.”

The lyrics in the Japanese version aren’t all that different: “Heart of a woman, heart of a man / It’s always beating, that feeling of love / My frilly ribbon — it’s pretty rough.” Fatimah notes that the last part doesn’t translate well literally, then she adds that the “heart of a woman”/“heart of a man” in the first line isn’t necessarily literal; it could be a metaphorical heart, meaning more “essence,” and I think this is interesting in the context of Birdo’s gender. Rather than the straightforward way the English lyrics seem to be talking about romance, Birdo could be singing about gender — and if any character in the Mario series is going to be commenting on gender, it’s Birdo.

Birdo also appears as a playable character in 2007’s Monopoly-like Idataki Street DS, which was only released in Japan. The game pits Super Mario characters against those from the Dragon Quest series, and Birdo’s profile once again refers to her as “a pink dinosaur who’s convinced he’s a woman, and is a young maiden at heart.” (A 2011 sequel, which was released outside Japan as Fortune Street, offered up an English bio that gave her female pronouns.)

The Wii U / Switch Years

I’m combining the two most recent Nintendo consoles into one section because there’s just not that much to say about Birdo as of late. That’s not to say that she’s not around. She’s racked up more appearances in the last decade than in any other. It’s more that Nintendo seems less interested in discussing her gender. Again, up until the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door allowed Vivian to be fairly explicitly trans, I presumed that this was a result of Nintendo not wanting to broach the topic in the Super Mario series, but now I’m not so sure.

(And as with every section, if you can think of something notable from this era I should include, please let me know!)

For what it’s worth, Birdo gets one more trophy in Super Smash Bros. for Wii U, and while the English version skips over gender entirely, the Japanese text makes liberal use of he/him pronouns for a change.

Birdo is playable in the 2014 3DS title Mario Golf: World Tour, and in one of her win animations you see another example of a trend with her and amorous affections: She kisses the camera and causes it (or possibly the cameraman?) to fall over.

It’s not much, but does follow a pattern that has characters generally disliking it when they’re on the receiving end of her love. I suppose it’s up to the viewer to decide how to interpret this. If it’s not a transphobic joke, then it’s one about Birdo being unattractive or otherwise too much or not enough.

In 2016, Birdo appeared in Paper Mario: Color Splash, performing an even bigger version of her previous cabaret number. And while the English lyrics are laced with callback upon callback — the flutter jump, for example, is one of Yoshi’s trademark moves — the Japanese ones opt for a more straightforward tone.

In Japanese, the Koopa Troopa dancers sing, “When did we fall so madly in love? With plump, pouty lips and overdone purple eyeshadow,” and then Birdo descends from the ceiling, asking “Hello there~ Did you call~?” Then she repeats the lyrics from the Sticker Star performance, including with “Oh no, the egg’ll come out, ah~” in a rather flirtatious, suggestive manner.

The Switch’s first Mario Party entry, 2018’s Super Mario Party, caused some concern when it was brought to popular attention that Birdo’s gender changed according to what translation you were looking at — and not just between English and Japanese, either. The in-game text assigned her female pronouns for American English but male ones for British English. As it usually does, Japanese just skipped the pronouns altogether.

And that brings us to the most recent game, as of the posting of this piece, to comment on Birdo’s gender in one way or another: Paper Mario: The Origami King, which gives our pink dino friend her biggest musical moment yet. One of the areas in the game is Shogun Studios, an amusement park takeoff on the real-life Edo Wonderland, and this spot’s “final dungeon,” so to speak, is a theater show starring Birdo. It’s kind of a mashup of The Outsiders and West Side Story, with Birdo playing the female lead and Mario being plucked from the audience to play her love interest.

She’s flirtatious as usual, and once again, Birdo’s kisses seem to cause bodily harm, but Birdo takes it in stride and even closes out with “Despite my prior warnings, here you are… with egg on your face” — a callback to her previous Paper Mario appearances.

It’s as splashy a place I could hope to end this run-through of her career in video games so far.

Putting a Bow on It

Some people might look at this and wonder why I bothered to compile it. For one thing, I just like Birdo. Always have. Even as a little kid, I was the type of guy who is always rooting for the underdog female characters in whatever franchise he’s taking in. I like Jan more than Marcia, Poison Ivy more than Catwoman, Mileena more than Kitana, Madelyne Pryor more than Jean Grey. Barring Pauline, who existed in some kind of franchise limbo for decades, Birdo was the underdog female character in the Super Mario games — present since SMB2 but waiting in the wings for years. She often is waiting still, honestly, and I’ll point out that it took her almost a full decade from the initial release of Mario Kart 8 to become a playable racer.

Just for the sake of evening out the gender ratio in a popular franchise, I think it’s awesome that Birdo is a regular part of the games today — and more and more frequently, a playable character at that. But I’m also surprised that Nintendo allowed her to be “a boy who thinks he’s a girl” all the way back in 1988. (There is some precedent for this in Japanese pop culture from time, and I get into it in the miscellaneous section.)

For the faction of Super Mario fans who see Birdo’s transness as a plus, it would be cool if Nintendo one day decided to standardize the aspect of her in one or all regions. And while I’m not holding my breath that this will happen, I’d like to underscore how she would be the first trans video game character. If we’re only counting characters who are canonically, explicitly trans, then the trophy goes to Yasmin, a character in the 1989 MS-DOS game Circuit’s Edge, which I’d never actually heard of before researching this piece and which might only be famous for being the game to feature the first trans character. Birdo’s also easily the most famous of any such character debuting in the classic era, with only Poison from Final Fight/Street Fighter giving her a run for her money. This is a milestone Nintendo could celebrate.

However, even if the company never explicitly says “yes, she is,” there’s so much evidence pointing toward this that we don’t really need an official confirmation. Queer people have done a lot more with a lot less, after all. And just having her be part of one the most popular and longest-lived video game franchises means something on its own.

If I can close on a personal note, I actually have to credit Birdo as playing a minor role in my process of realizing that I was gay. Back in the early days of dial-up internet, I remember looking online for info about Birdo on some pre-Google search engine. I ended up on some fansite that celebrated Birdo as a gay icon, and if I’m remembering correctly, the site had a rainbow flag and that’s actually how I realized what rainbow flags signified. (I’d imagine this site is preserved somewhere on the Wayback Machine, but I haven’t been able to remember what it’s called. If you remember, please let me know.) My reaction at the time was something like, “Oh, how interesting! This delightful weirdo character that I enjoy is also beloved by gay people. I wonder what that means?” LOL.

Three decades later, I’m secure in my identity as a gay man, and I have an entire podcast about how the queer people of my generation used pop culture as a way to discover who they actually were. But I still wanted to give Birdo her due, and to that end, here’s art of me (in a Tanooki suit, natch) and Birdo that I commissioned for this piece back in 2023, when I first started working on it.

Miscellaneous Notes

In researching all this, one of the questions I wanted to answer is whether Japanese people would have thought it strange to have a character introduced as “a boy who thinks he’s a girl” in a children’s product back around the time Doki Doki Panic went on sale. The short answer is apparently not, but it’s complicated. First off, I should point out that concepts of gender and sexuality used in the United States today wouldn’t always align with those used in Japan today, much less back in 1987. More often than not, Americans will use terms such as gay, lesbian or trans as ways of shorthanding broad concepts in a way that make sense to us, but we’re smoothing off the nuances of another culture’s way of discussing these matters. All that said, a character like Birdo would have made more sense in Japan at the time than in the U.S.

Among the pop culture precedents and contemporaries I could find (or that people more experienced in this field of research told me about) were the following:

Princess Knight (リボンの騎士, Ribon no Kishi or “A Knight in Ribbons”): A manga series written and illustrated in Osamu Tezuka and debuting in 1953, Princess Knight tells the story of Sapphire, a girl born with the blue heart of boy in addition to the pink heart of a girl and who presents as a male knight in order to inherit the throne of Silverland. The fact that Birdo’s signature item is a bow is probably a coincidence, especially given how frequently bows were used in early video games to demonstrate visually that a character is female. (Fatimah points out that shoujo manga — literally, “girls’ comics” — tend toward queer themes and exploration sof gender, and that this video does a good job of explaining why.)
Claudine (クローディーヌ...!): A 1978 manga written and illustrated by Riyoko Ikea about a Claude, French aristocrat assigned female at birth who identifies as male. Ikea also created the Rose of Versailles, a 1982 manga with similar themes which I discuss in greater depth in my post about Charlotte from Samurai Shodown.
Stop!! Hibari-Kun! (ストップ!! ひばりくん!,): A manga series written and illustrated by Hisashi Eguchi and debuting in 1981, it’s a romcom about a teenager who moves in with a new family and is surprised to learn that the attractive daughter, Hibari, is trans.
Ranma ½ (らんま⁠½): The famous manga by Rumiko Takahashi is basically “fun with gender and also martial arts happen sometimes. It debuted in 1987, just a month after Doki Doki Panic did. As we discuss in the Ranma ½ installment of my TV podcast, Gayest Episode Ever, Takahashi often codes characters as gay or trans but then stops short of actually allowing them to fully be that.
KochiKame: Tokyo Beat Cops (こち亀): A manga series written and illustrated by Osamu Akimoto, it a December 1990 installment features a new character: Ai Asato/Maria, a female officer who is read as trans and whose apparent transition happens as the result of magic.
YuYu Hakusho (幽☆遊☆白書): In 1991, the manga series introduces a new character, Miyuki, who can potentially be read as trans or genderfluid.

This is not a complete list, of course, and none of these feature characters that work quite like Birdo does. In my head, at least, they give some context for how Japanese pop culture was portraying trans characters or similar leading up to and around the same time as Doki Doki Panic’s release. (A big thank-you to James Welker, Mollie L. Patterson, Emily Balistrieri, Diamond Feit and Kazuma Hashimoto for pointing me in one direction or another in researching this.) I also couldn’t think of a similar character in any popular western children’s media from the time. I mean, there’s Tweety Bird, but the closest I could come up with as a comparison for Birdo in a western cartoon was HIM from Powerpuff Girls, and they’re not much alike at all.

As long as we’re talking about Birdo’s origins, there’s a comment on this SMB2 post asking about a possible connection between her and the Disney character Figment. As explained in this great GTV video about the origins of the Fuji TV event for which Nintendo created Doki Doki Panic, a big inspiration for the event was Disney’s Epcot Center. Figment, a purple dragon, is a mascot of sorts for the Epcot Center, and even has his own ride: Journey Into Imagination. I suppose there might be an influence in here — the protagonist of Doki Doki Panic is named Imajin, after all — but I just don’t really see it aside from dinosaurs and dragons having similar basic body shapes.

No, if I was going to point to a character from elsewhere in pop culture and speculate that it helped inspire Birdo, I’d guess the Snowths from the Muppets. They’re the pink creatures who are best known for singing back up in the “Mahna Mahna” song.

They first appeared in 1969 and I’d guess it’s likely someone on the Doki Doki Panic would have seen them before creating Birdo, but that’s just a wild guess on my part.

Another question I can’t answer: Why is she named Birdo? As I stated before, there are a lot more obviously bird-like enemies in SMB2 and any of them could have been given that name. And while today there’s a lot more public awareness of the connection between dinosaurs and birds, I’m not sure that was in the zeitgeist enough in 1988 to explain why whoever did the localization would have picked this over just letting the character retain her Japanese name. Most of the localized enemy names in SMB2 are fairly obvious puns — Albatoss for the bird that drops stuff on you, Cobrat for the snake enemy, Panser for the flower that shoots fireballs like a an army tank — but this one just seems inexplicable to me.

Considering how the instruction booklets were some of the only official Nintendo lore for the Super Mario games, it’s notable that The Super Mario Bros. Super Show ignores Birdo’s “gender confusion” backstory altogether. Debuting a year after SMB2 hit shelves, this series combined live-action segments with cartoons, with the animated segments veering off in weird directions that couldn’t have less to do with the actual games. (Examples include the extended Star Wars parody, “Rap Land,” and the one about BMX racing.) This first one, “The Bird! The Bird!” is pretty well-grounded in what the games offer us, however, with Mario and friends venturing through an ice world where they encounter Birdo. This version of Birdo, however, is presented as being a mother who mistakes Toad for her missing baby.

It’s worth noting that this show introduced the idea of Baby Birdo about a year before Super Mario World would introduce Baby Yoshi — and for what it’s worth, Baby Birdo *still* has not made an appearance in the video game series proper.

Birdo shows up in the manga series Super Mario-kun, which I have not read, but I have read Kazuki Motoyama’s Super Mario manga, and the one based on Super Mario USA uses her as a comic relief character. One running joke is Luigi feeling uncomfortable around her, and another is her urinating while standing up.

This is Birdo’s first appearance, and even though Mario initially mistakes her for a cow, her Real Housewives intro phrase is “I am Catherine, lady of the heavens!”

The second go-around with Birdo begins with her nonchalantly peeing off the side of a cliff. (She will later do this on the boss character Fry Guy.) Her response to Mario is “And what are YOU looking at?” Mario responds, “Hurry up and hand over the crystal ball, you freak!” Birdo doesn’t like this and counters with “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to be gentle with a lady?” And finally gets the last line: “Are you actually a girl?”

Continuing from the previous page, Birdo spits the crystal ball at Peach and then declares, “I laid an egg, so that makes me a girl. Plus I got a big bow.” Peach responds, “So does that make me a guy for not having a ribbon?”

Later, after Peach has been kidnapped by Wart and Birdo has replaced her in the main party, Mario promises her that if she helps them defeat the big bad, they’ll set her up with someone. It’s Yoshi (rendered “Yossy”). Toad chimes in, “He’s male, but he lays eggs like you"! Birdo is impressed by this info, and the next panel is a cutaway to Yoshi, making cookies a la Yoshi’s Cookie, suddenly getting a chill. It’s another joke about Birdo being the booby prize of Marioverse females.

However, there may be someone who is even less appealing to our heroes. This trio of Birdos explains “We’re actually males, you see~” and while Mario, Luigi and Toad initially brush them off, Wendy O. Koopa appears, announcing “I’m heeere!” The last panel has our three heroes suddenly applying female cosmetics, saying “Guess it’s time to become queers too!”

Shortly before the publication of this post, Nintendo posted a 22-minute YouTube video that frontloads an exploration of the female characters in the Super Mario series. Wendy O. Koopa and Dixie Kong get shoutouts, but Birdo does not get mentioned. I was offended on her behalf. But for what it’s worth, she’s also nowhere to be found in the Universal Studios Hollywood version of Super Nintendo World. Even Pom Pom shows up there — and I’m willing to bet that Pom Pom is nobody’s favorite character.

At this point, the Super Mario series gives most of its major players alternate forms. From Metal Mario to Dry Bowser to the forgotten but nonetheless still radical Vampire Wario. Birdo got an alternate form in Super Mario Advance, however, that has yet to rematerialize anywhere, and I think that’s a shame because it rocks: Robirdo. It is exactly as you’d expect: a giant, robotic version of Birdo.

Technically speaking, the only Mario & Luigi RPG Birdo appears in is Superstar Saga, but Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story does feature a boss who takes visual inspiration from her: Durmite, a pink and blue caterpillar-like creature whose face looks a lot like Birdo’s.

There’s even a version of the character that transforms into a butterfly, and I feel like it makes for a pretty clear analogy.

The first Super Mario-themed tennis game was actually for the Virtual Boy: 1995’s Mario’s Tennis. It features seven playable characters: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Yoshi, Toad, Donkey Kong Jr., and Koopa Troopa. Given that Bowser is the only playable character from Super Mario Kart not represented here, you’d probably think that the missing player was him. However, a look into the game’s ROM revealed that it’s actually Birdo who was planned as the eighth playable character, as the name Cassarin appears in the code alongside everyone else’s.

Apparently Birdo got into the 2000 installment of Mario Tennis only because Nintendo rejected Camelot’s idea for a new female character. In an archived interview, assistant director Yusuku Sugimoto said his initial suggestion was a “Wario” version of Peach, to complement the fact that this game invented Waluigi for Luigi. Nintendo said the idea wasn’t appealing, however, and responded by suggesting Daisy and Birdo, who Sugimoto had neve heard of but who he accepted into the fold. The idea lingered, however, and when Camlot was working on 2004’s Mario Power Tennis, a different employee, Fumihide Aoki, attempted a new twist on this warui version of Peach, dubbed ワルピーチ (Warupīchi, rendered in English as the unfortunate-sounding Walpeach). She still didn’t make the cut, however, but then again, neither did Birdo.

Finally, there is a possible connection between Birdo’s storyline in Captain Rainbow and a mystery involving Peach in Super Mario RPG. In the same way as Captain Rainbow has you searching Birdo’s bedroom to find a mystery item, Super Mario RPG has a sequence where you can examine Peach’s bedroom to find an invisible item that is identified as Peach’s ??? in the English version and Pīchi no XXX (ピーチのXXX) in the Japanese. However, as soon as you pick it up, either Peach or her maid will scold you for rummaging through people’s private possessions. It could be anything, really — a diary, a sexy romance novel, a tampon — and certainly it’s not strongly hinted that it’s a vibrator like it is in Captain Rainbow. However, the fact is that Super Mario RPG just doesn’t tell you, and you’re just left to compare these two situations and wonder. Hmm…