Is there anything stopping you from picking the opposite gender? Personally I've never looked at the avatar of another user and thought, oh he's male, or she's female. I take the users as users and their comments are genderless. Once I find out their gender it makes no difference to me as I've made up my opinion about the user based off the content that they have posted.
I understand the concern, but as I stated before, there's nothing stopping someone who doesn't want their gender known from picking the other gender. I'm pretty sure the Admins are not going to banhammer everyone that provided false gender information. It's used for the avatars only from what I can gather.
If anything, the Admins could add an option to hide the avatar from public by default for everyone and those that want their gender disclosed can opt-in to displaying it. That way the only people that could know your gender are the Admins.
Is there anything stopping you from picking the opposite gender? Personally I've never looked at the avatar of another user and thought, oh he's male, or she's female. I take the users as users and their comments are genderless. Once I find out their gender it makes no difference to me as I've made up my opinion about the user based off the content that they have posted.
I understand the concern, but as I stated before, there's nothing stopping someone who doesn't want their gender known from picking the other gender. I'm pretty sure the Admins are not going to banhammer everyone that provided false gender information. It's used for the avatars only from what I can gather.
If anything, the Admins could add an option to hide the avatar from public by default for everyone and those that want their gender disclosed can opt-in to displaying it. That way the only people that could know your gender are the Admins.