RedEye wrote:What is brought up though, is that with the totality of change that the "Shift" becomes, the changing of gender is actually a minor thing since so much else is going on at the time.
How "minor" it is would depend on how you defined the shift. It would be less extreme than a total species change, but as I said, I don't interpret shifting as changing one's species: only altering one's self to more closely resemble another species.
Referring to lycanthropes as a separate species would essentially be to define "species" solely by outward appearance. If that were the case, then
Erik Sprague,
Paul Lawrence and
Dennis Avner would no longer be human either.
What I'm getting at is that lycanthropy would, in my mind, only alter a werewolf's gender if you defined that based solely on outward appearance as well. It might alter a werewolf's parts to
resemble the opposite gender, but it wouldn't
literally result in a complete gender reversal.
Intersexism is possible among normal humans (Caster Semenya, for example), so I would agree to the possibility of a 1/1000 chance of gender ambiguity, though I still don't think those 1/1000 werewolves would be seen as anything more than having an awkward looking wereform. Just because it
looks like a gender change doesn't mean it is.