The trim-color house cats refers to all calicos... calicos are white spotted tortoiseshell cats. The "is orange or black" is a X linked gene, so you can have XoXb... and then the x chromosome inactivation kicks in and some groups of cells are activated orange and some are activated black.

But (not white) spots and variations of color get into things like the Agouti gene ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agouti_coloration_genetics ). A tabby cat (black and tan, or orange and darker orange) has no sex linked characteristics.

For a deep dive into the genetics of Agouti and how that influences cat fur colors, http://messybeast.com/genetics-agouti-and-corin.htm

Side bit - the wiki page for X chromosome inactivation shows a picture of a tortoise shell cat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-inactivation

http://messybeast.com/tricolours.htm

And white spots gets into interesting questions of embryonic cell differentiation http://messybeast.com/bicolours.htm

The "why are there large splotches of color with a calico cat compared to the much more mottled color pattern of a tortoise shell cat?"

http://messybeast.com/genetics-index.htm has a deep rabbit hole to go down (and that's for domestic cats... http://messybeast.com/wildcats-index.htm for the other cats).

you can have a calico that's not plain female but it's through random rare dna quirks. anyway, that link above i'm sharing because it's interesting.