I go with male, pretty much based on the above spoiler. In the early strips, Rich Burlew wasn’t yet playing off the unintentional ambiguity about V’s gender, and although it’s clear that different characters take V as either male or female and go from there (Sabine refers to V as ‘sister’ in the bar, for example, and asks for advice about men), I don’t see that it would have been a plot point at that early stage of the comic..
As for V’s mate … hmmm. The default assumption would be that Inkyrius is of the opposite sex to V, but there’s no real reason that has to be. The children are adopted, so there’s no requirement that their adopted parents be one male and one female. That truly could go either way, but nevertheless I’m going to register my guess that Inkyrius is female.
And with V being a wizard and all, who knows what hijinks V and Inky have gotten up to with various polymorph and shapechange spells? It’s possible for both to be female…any still have both borne one of the children by the other!
Or else you can take the scene literally: V actually did spill some ink, assumed Roy could see what gender he/she is, and doesn’t think the issue is something worth wasting his/her powerful intellect on. Remember, V once thought he/she saw Elan kissing a male cop, and only noted that Haley might be jealous. Questions of gender and sexual preference don’t even appear on his/her radar screen.
I can think of nothing that fits this description - a classic Five Man Band has a token female, or the Chick is a dude, or the group is female dominated…
Having exactly 2 is a fairly modern thing, seeking to maintain the Five Man Band formula while reducing the tokenism inherent in having a single girl, but not wanting to have the group female dominated. So, the second’s not there to ‘balance’ the Chick, she’s there so the Chick doesn’t stand out.
Not to mention that if anyone’s the Chick of the Order, it’s Elan, not Haley. (And it’s a 6 person party, so it’s not a Five Man Band, anyway. Especially as neither Haley nor Belkar fits into the formula comfortably, and Durkon fills 2 rolls.)
Which isn’t good evidence either way - characters used in avatars are pretty much useless as a guide to the user’s gender (depending on the forum, even how fanservicey they are can be a lousy guide).
There’s a scene back home where V’s partner has offloaded the kids for the night (obviously intending a romantic evening) And V is all “excellent I will be using the quiet to study in the library” oblivious to the partner’s plans. I took that as more of a male trait.
Masculine female. Inky’s a feminine male. Like has been stated, every character has decided for themselves, and it seems like Haley, who has the best chance of knowing, treats her as female.
I don’t think that V would ever spill ink accidentally. If e did, then e would have promptly rearranged the fundamental building blocks of the universe in under 6 seconds, with enough time left to move 30 feet, so that the ink was removed. (On the Origin of PCs, page 60). V mentions that e’s quite a good gardener and has impeccable table manners, so apparently appearances are important to hier. In other words, I’m certain that that ink blot was no accident, especially since it so perfectly covered the response, except for the left lower leg of the letter, which could be F or M.
She’s an odd one out, I’ll give you that. Her name is declined according to a different pattern than most Roman names (which is true for a number of of the gods).
Perhaps I should have said names ending in -ius. The i is not part of the masculine ending, but many many Roman family names have stems ending with i (Julius, Flavius, Tullius, Antonius and on and on). The feminine form ends with -ia, as in Julia, for example.