Rust is a survival game on Steam. It is created by Facepunch Studios. The game is currently an early access game and is in active development. A recent update randomly assigns a player a permanent character gender.
Rust is multiplayer game where players attempt to survive through awful conditions “where humanity has been reduced to cavemen”. There are several things that can cause your character to die including falls, prolonged exposure to radiation, starvation, and being killed by another player. That player can then take your stuff. Players can decide if they want to survive by killing the other players or if they want to make friends and band together with other players.
Players cannot, however, choose the gender of their character. When the game first became available, the only option was to play a white, male, character. Later, the game arbitrarily assigned players with unchangeable skin tones and faces. Recently, an update to Rust added female models to the game. As before, the game assigns the character’s gender and appearance. The gender of your character is assigned by your Steam ID.
As you may have expected, this has caused some players to complain because they do not want to play a female character. Some have gone so far as to state that they will quit playing the game if they have to play a female character. Others wanted to play as a female character, but were assigned a male character, and were disappointed. A quick read through the Rust Forums also reveals that there are some players who are very happy to have been assigned a female character (for a variety of reasons).
The Rust blog post about the update includes the following:
We understand this is a sore subject for a lot of people. We understand that you may now be a gender that you don’t identify with in real-life. We understand this causes you distress and makes you not want to play the game anymore. Technically nothing has changed, since half the population was already living with those feelings. The only difference is that whether you feel like this is now decided by your Steam ID instead of your real life gender.
The blog also notes that this is the first pass of an ongoing rework of the player model. This means that “you’re probably not stuck with your new face forever” (as the blog post explains). There is no indication that players will ever be allowed to customize their character themselves, though.