  We study spin and super-modular categories systematically as inspired by
fermionic topological phases of matter, which are always fermion parity
enriched and modelled by spin TQFTs at low energy. We formulate a $16$-fold way
conjecture for the minimal modular extensions of super-modular categories to
spin modular categories, which is a categorical formulation of gauging the
fermion parity. We investigate general properties of super-modular categories
such as fermions in twisted Drinfeld doubles, Verlinde formulas for naive
quotients, and explicit extensions of $PSU(2)_{4m+2}$ with an eye towards a
classification of the low-rank cases.
