a Response.

[fox]

Anjelika says (and so does the Feedback team, incidentally):

the code update that you refer to is not live and did not have any chance to go live. That was a beta release, we always push code to beta to see if everything works correctly. In many cases it does not and we either fix bugs or pull the code from the final release plan.
We were going to add a gender field to the sign up user flow, which is fine, but by mistake it became a mandatory "female/male" field for everyone. This is why this is not going live. And this is what beta releases are for, to see problems and solve them before any user faces a problem.

Whether that's a result of developers going "Whoa, wait, what?!" or "Shit, guess we'd better not, then" is beside the point as long as the thing doesn't in fact go live.

I do still have DW invites if anyone wants them. :-)