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When you first create a new character, you have many choices to make. Some of these choices -- faction, race, and class -- will dramatically affect your gameplay. Others, like hair color and facial features, are purely cosmetic. One decision, however, straddles the border between significant and arbitrary: Will you be male or female? Male and female characters have no stat differences, so picking one over the other is essentially an aesthetic option ... or is it?

Gender politics in WoW are a huge topic in their own right, so we'll keep the scope narrow and focus just on the choice at the point of character creation. How do you decide which sex to be? Some believe that one should play one's own sex and not the other (the term G.I.R.L. [guy in real life] springs to mind here). Others say it's totally up to each player, and it doesn't matter if a guy wants to play as a girl or vice versa. Still others think your choice of character gender says something about who you are as a person; a rival camp claims your choice of sex has little to do with who you are in real life.

How did you make that decision when you first created a new avatar? Perhaps you automatically gravitated toward your own sex, or the opposite. Perhaps you felt pressure from an outside source -- social mores, a friend, your beliefs or opinions -- and chose given those parameters. Perhaps you just took whatever the game gave you at the outset.

Are most of your characters male? Female? Or do you have an even split? Which sex do you play the most, and why? Do you think a player's gender choice says something about who he or she is?

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