Feel free to start a thread on whether IF can be good/artistic/lilterary fiction–I don’t think there’s an existing one, though some of the writing/content threads touch on it. Any thread titled “gender choice,” on the other hand, is likely to be rolled into one of the majillion existing discussions on the topic, as yours was.
There’s room in IF for a wide range of approaches, all of which can produce good fiction. CoG’s standard approach is to make the choice of gender (and race and orientation) as unimportant to the plot as possible. As Jason recently said, CoG publishes IF in which
This seems eminently artistically defensible–unless we’re narrowing our vision of what is “artistic” or “literary” to a particular idea of what main characters should be and do (probably borrowed from a particular set of ideas about what makes a good novel).
The broader issue of author agency versus reader agency is worth a separate thread. But briefly, I don’t think there’s one true way or that IF should be “exclusively the domain” of anything.
Some authors will treat their readers as co-creators, posing choices that affect not just the MC’s actions but the MC’s history and certain features of the world. Others will stick to letting the reader choose only the things the MC would in fact control.
It would also be possible, though perhaps not popular, to write an IF where the reader doesn’t change anything but merely explores an existing set of characters–where the purpose isn’t to change the outcome but to understand it.
I don’t think any of these are inherently artistic or artless. They’re different approaches, any of which could be realized artfully.