Is IT Male, Female, or Something Else? Welcome to Derry Season 1 Explained

Pennywise is back on TV, which means the same question keeps bubbling up in my inbox: so what is IT's gender, exactly? Short answer: it's complicated, and the show only stirs the pot in fun ways.

The book's answer (as clear as it gets)

Stephen King's IT isn't a guy in makeup or even a creature with biology the way we understand it. It's an ancient Todash entity, a cosmic thing that doesn't live by our rules. What we see — the clown, the spider, the wolf, whatever — are just projections our brains can handle. So any talk about sex or gender is automatically filtered through human perception, not IT's true form.

That said, the novel does give us a pretty specific moment. During the final showdown, through Ben's point of view, the Losers understand that IT is female and carrying offspring. King treats that realization as legit within human perception — not a mix-up, not a metaphor. You're meant to take it as the right way for a human to grasp what they're facing.

Here's the catch: even if the characters are correctly perceiving a kind of pregnancy, IT isn't pregnant in a human, earth-biological sense. Think of it like this: the book says the perception is real, but the biology behind it is utterly alien. The language we have — "female," "pregnant" — is the closest we can get to describing something we can't actually comprehend.

So is Pennywise a "he" or a "she"?

Pennywise the Dancing Clown, as a form, is coded male. Calling the clown "he" within that context isn't wrong — but Pennywise is a mask. IT picks forms based on what will mess with you the most, not because of any personal identity. Gender, for IT, is a tool. It's part of the costume rack, not the creature's truth. That's why the story can hold two ideas at once: the entity is functionally "female" when it's reproducing, and it's a "he" when it's wearing the clown suit, and neither label really contains what IT is.

What the new series adds (and why fans are debating again)

"IT: Welcome to Derry" widens the lens in a way the movies only grazed. It leans into IT's ability to wear any face and keeps the clown offscreen for a while to build dread through atmosphere and other incarnations first. When Bill Skarsgård finally shows up in full Pennywise mode, it hits that much harder — and throughout Season 1, he's still the standout presence.

The show also makes a lore swing that's going to raise eyebrows: Pennywise the Dancing Clown was a real human performer named Bob Gray. According to the series, IT was drawn to Bob because he was great at attracting kids, killed him, and then adopted his persona. That's less "IT manifested a clown because clowns are scary" and more "it found a ready-made mask that worked and put it on for good."

• Bottom line: the forms IT wears — clown included — are tactics. They don't define a gender; they exploit ours. The novel backs that up, and the series doubles down on it by treating gendered appearances as part of the hunting strategy, not identity.

The take-away

If you need a practical answer: within the story's logic, calling Pennywise "he" is fine when you mean the clown, and calling IT "she" makes sense when you're talking about the book's reproduction reveal. But the real answer is that IT lives outside our categories — it uses them against us.

Got your own read on IT's gender? Drop it in the comments — I'm curious where you land.

"IT: Welcome to Derry" is now streaming on HBO Max.