My paladin's a guy, but I'm not

The recent re-customization thing brought up an old conversation I had with someone in-game. I'd run instances with this person several times, and he knew I was a woman who played a male paladin. A male paladin with the semi-androgyneous name of Gillien (pronounced with a hard "G" if you're curious).

This was back during the waning days of TBC and he told me that he heard Blizzard was going to offer gender swapping in Wrath. Whether he had inside info or it was just a lucky rumor he heard I don't know, but in any case I just figured "whatever." Then he said I could change Gillien into a girl.

And I wondered… Why? Why did he think I would be interested?

Just because I'm female doesn't mean I want my characters to all be girls. Most of them are (truthfully, of all my WoW alts Gillien is the only guy), but I obviously made Gillien a male for a reason. I can't think of anyone who's ever claimed to be the wrong gender because they misclicked on the character creation screen.

I know this isn't the case with everyone, but at least for me, all my characters have a token story behind them, a hint of an RP personality, and when I finally realized that I had a character concept for a paladin it happened to be a man. Gillien will never undergo a sex change because he is who he is and changing his gender would make him a different person. If I wanted to play a belf female paladin I would have made one.

I could understand maybe switching genders if the character emotes eventually got to be too much (I know my human female's laugh grates on my ears), or because of repeated harassment (female characters being asked by random strangers to dance naked by the mailbox), or even for a good laugh among guildies, but I've been pretty happy with Gillien, who hasn't faced any harassment beyond the usual fun that's made at blood elf men for being preening egomaniacs.

The strangest thing is... the person asking was a man who as far as I knew only played female characters. I no longer keep in contact with him and I haven't seen him around in Wrath, but now that gender changes are possible, I have a mild curiosity whether or not he's done the swap.