Well, I\'d heard that there were some issues with uploading characters so I decided to do what I do with most games: create a test character.
So I looked through the various avatars and carefully created a character with nice balanced stats... and sure enough it failed to upload properly. I thought righty ho, don\'t wanna lock up my name and have to send an email before I even get to play the game so I created another \"test\" character by the \"hit all and any buttons\" method... hit next, next next and it uploaded and connected. Oops, wrong gender. Oh well, it\'s a test character...
Walked around, talked to a few people, found crystals. Thought \"cool!\". Then I got kinda attached to my character, being that I\'d made a couple game-mates and had an inventory with stuff in it. So I thought what the hey, I\'ll keep it.
Short answer: I\'m male but I have an avatar of a different name that is female. Since it\'s still in pre-alpha and I couldn\'t select the avatar I really wanted I don\'t see any reason why it is a problem. In later versions I\'ll select a male avatar, not that it matters a great deal, after all role playing is all about pretending you are something you are not

(p.s w00t for first post!)