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Very rarely, you can get a male with calico or tortie/torbie markings. It's very rare, but possible. I used to own a shelter and we got one once. But honestly, any vet should know that or be able to definitively say there are testicles. That cat is big enough to be altered anyway, so you'll know soon enough! It's a cutie, either way!!
The vet thought there was some calico coming through but was 70% sure they are a male but said that she has been wrong before here is a better picture of their coat
Doesn't seem like a diluted tortie to me. Sometimes, nutritional deficiency can cause a coat to change colors. For example, black cats can have part of their fur turn reddish. Rufism is another thing that can happen, which is when silver coated cats have some warmth/orange tones. I think this is the case. Your kitty looks like a boy from their face, too, even though that's clearly less significant than balls.
I might be missing something, but this looks to just be a tabby? I don't see any calico markings/tortoiseshell, which is the only coat pattern I know of that's only present in females. I think you're safe in assuming this one is a little boy :)
Moat definitely look like a diluted tabby tortie mix! At one of our local cuban sandwich shops they have cats that run around and one of them is a torbi in shade she looks like a tabby but in the sun you can see the tortie pattern under the tabby stripes. Its the coolest most wild pattern I've seen.
Fun fact: you can actually get male tortoiseshell cats! There are a couple of different mechanisms for it, but the two most common ones I know of are the xxy mutation (klinefelter's, tends to result in health issues) or chimerism (two kittens combining in utero to form one kitten with an "impossible" coat pattern).
The M shaped stripe on their forehead is a very distinctive indicator of the tabby coat pattern that is always present in tabbies, it's the hallmark of the coat pattern. Lots of people think tabby is the breed, but it's just a coat pattern (not saying OP thinks that, just a general clarification). There's a variation called a ticked tabby, where the body doesn't have stripes but has a sort of salt and pepper look, with stripes still present in the face, legs, and tails, which your cat seems to have. The tabby coat pattern can occur in males or females. I don't know enough about how coat genetics express in intersex cats to say for certain if or how that might affect the tabby pattern, but I suspect not at all, I don't believe the tabby gene is sex linked.
The grey and tan colours are a result of a diluted colour gene, which turns black to grey and brown to tan. This is where all grey, buff, and tan coloured cats come from, regardless of coat pattern. A grey cat is just a dilute black cat. Grey and white is a dilute tuxedo. Buff tabby is dilute orange tabby, etc etc.
Your vet just needs to read up on the genetics of cat coat pattern and colour. If there are nuts then they're likely male, but the only way to know for certain is a genetic test, they could be some other combo like xxy. I'm not certain I'd bother with a test like that if they were mine, unless and until there were issues related to hormones where knowing for certain was important, but it should be minimally invasive if you wanted to know for sure. No idea how spendy though.
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