I was today years old when I learned that Clippy has a canonical gender

It was just another day at PC Gamer towers when a colleague posted a message in Slack bemoaning that they keep getting jump-scared after “accidentally pressing the button in Google Docs that causes an AI woman to start reading articles at me.” I simply replied: “Clippy would never” to which they said “Clippy has blood on its hands.”

And just like that, for the first time in my life, I wondered whether Clippy has a gender.

I went in search of answers and, sure enough, the truth is out there. Well, one version of the truth, but as it’s from the guy who actually created Clippy I think it has to count as canon.

Clippy is a paperclip: but he’s also a man. I found an old Motherboard interview with illustrator Kevan Atteberry (that’s him in the lead image), which weirdly enough happened when a piece of fan art depicting Clippy as pregnant went semi-viral.

“It’s important to me that people remember Clippy because as long as they do, I have cachet,” Atteberry told Motherboard in 2017. Asked if the pregnant Clippy is the weirdest fan art he’s seen, Atteberry clears up the gender question once and for all:

“I’ve not seen anything weirder. I’ve seen pregnant Clippys, suicide Clippys, things like that. But to take him and, first of all, there’s no volume in a paper clip, and to use the paper to make him pregnant… The fact that I’ve always considered Clippy a male… How did he get pregnant? Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Who got him pregnant? How is this possible?”

Shades of “How is babby formed?” there. Maybe Atteberry is reading too much into it, but I’m the one sitting here writing about whether Clippy is a man or a woman paperclip in 2026. Other Earth-shattering revelations (to me) include that the PC’s most iconic mascot was designed on an Apple. “I totally understand the annoyance factor [with Clippy],” says Attewell. “I didn’t really experience it myself, because I’m a Mac guy. In fact, I designed Clippy on a Mac.”

Finally, one of the best responses I’ve seen with regards to fan erotica featuring his character.

“Yep, a couple people sent me free copies,” said Attewell. “I’ve read through a little bit of it. The writing was, um, it was really technically subpar. It was hard to get through that. Not so much the context, but the writing… it wasn’t real compelling reading.”

The writers of Clippy erotica clearly need to up their game (or maybe touch some grass). Anyway, if you are an aspiring Clippy erotica writer, at least now you know which pronouns to use. Please make sure to keep Gilbert Gottfried’s voice in mind while conjuring up Clippy’s romantic exploits.

Microsoft did bring Clippy back last year, though don’t get too excited: it was as an Easter Egg in Copilot. The real man is never coming back, and where once we all found him annoying, he now seems quaint, and an icon of a better digital age. As Kerry Brunskill wrote a few years back after stumbling upon Clippy on an old PC, in the impeccably titled article Clippy Did Nothing Wrong:

“It didn’t take long before Clippy either completely misunderstood my text or was out of ideas entirely, but in the cold light of modernity I honestly appreciated bumping up against the edges of his database instead of being immediately funnelled towards similar ‘services’ in a company’s ‘digital ecosystem’.

“He was never eager to push me towards an online ‘community’ for advice, he never tried to nudge me into clicking on an ‘online training content’ icon, he never made me stare at a help page that gave over a good chunk of my screen to a stock image of someone smiling at a laptop placed next to an artistically arranged pile of books. Clippy never asked me to pay up to unlock better advice.”