I'm thinking about this from an MMO angle (with a pinch of dollmakers thrown in):

I too prefer that gender (and/or pronouns) not be a hard-coded part of the visual customization process. But when it comes to the visual side, I think actually I might be more interested in character creators that limit the range of aesthetic choices -- but interestingly. Here's five selectable body templates and all of them are brown-skinned. Here's three selectable starter outfits which say something about the universe that this character is going to exist in and the set of possibilities that we want to explore with it.