We’ve had a few threads about gender issues in the game so far and this hasn’t come up much. In the game, the only effect gender really has is cosmetic.
I feel like the initial argument, and the jokes it spawned, are in bad faith. I’d rather respond to it with education than anger.
When I’m picking whether my lizard person or wolf person or whatever has a masculine or feminine build and visible breasts. I’m not even sure if there is speech directed at the avatar that has gendered pronouns. It’s cosmetic. And most people agree the human body has a vast range of builds. Even among people who are not trans, there are men with feminine builds and women with masculine builds.
So an individual gets to pick whichever appearance they want to project. They also get to change that appearance for free. So if for some reason, they’d like to RP a Male Wargare who had a revelation at level 800 and became a Female Elf, so be it. If they want to choose a male appearance and say it’s a female-to-male trans character, nothing in the game stops them. If they want to literally represent genderfluid by swapping genders constantly, nothing stops them.
It also has no negative impact on other people. It might be a source of spam if there were chat notifications when someone updates their appearance. But there’s not. You’ll only notice something changed if, for some reason, you’ve seen someone else’s avatar so much you know the details of what they picked.
Most of the time people get upset when character creation is a major aspect of the game, is permanent, and has an impact on game scenarios. I find most LGBT people are completely fine with “you are choosing a body type” as the only side effect. Everyone’s happier if they have more body types. For example, we can’t choose a skinny or heavy build. It doesn’t really matter though, the only reason we have an avatar at all was they thought they might sell cosmetic items but they turned out not to pay off.
As an example of why I think this way, Pokémon has always allowed players to choose “BOY” or “GIRL” at the start. It changes pronouns and, in some cases, game scenarios based on this choice, but never alters the difficulty. All of my LGBT friends have praised this at some point or another.
I’d defer if I felt like someone were making a good faith argument, or if your avatar had an impact on the GoW experience. Instead I feel like OP is trying to pick a fight.