Unless charisma doesn't relate directly to appearance in which case nevermind.
But what if the character looks male but is not? or looks female but is not? Isn't using one of the descriptors that designates one or the other sorta metagame if one can't actually tell IC?
Just my two cents.
I'll post this on the original thread as well.
If a character LOOKS absolutely manly, aka hirsutism, beard, muscles, etc, but has a VAGOO, I mean.
How would anyone know?
I suppose I see gender as more a thing to use in subterfuge then I do something that matters on a social scale, if that makes any sense.
If any of the people they killed knew that Geisha was a man, it is very unlikely they would have been killed at all.
People are going to look at your character and assign them a gender. They do this in real life, too. As the player, you get to pick which one people are going to tend to assume it is. You also have control over the degree of ambiguity through the use of shortdescs like dyke, femboy, etc. and players can decide for themselves whether they mistake your gender or decide to stick with a 'they'.
There are expanded disguises on the way that might allow you to present as a different sex (?). These are still being worked on.
There are many in-universe methods of gender transition and modification.
I don't see what the problem is.
Whiterose from Mr. Robot uses their presentation of gender as a subterfuge to mask their identity. They present a male persona (Minister Zhang) when acting publicly as the head of China's ministry of state security, and present a female persona (Whiterose) when acting secretly as the leader of the Dark Army hacker group.
We're aware that it's possible to appear a different gender at a distance, and we do have plans to make this possible.