Its actually been brought up before with approval; its just that the forum software we have doesn't allow this

It's something we have no control over, and I'm not sure if there's even a patch that can be made to fix it.
But its part of the reason we introduced the pronoun field--and, once the policies on that are all ironed out, we're going to be getting rid of the gender field altogether.
Though, if people wanted, we
could add a custom field for it, displayed on your profile only, similar to the fursona description field? That might be a bit redundant, idk
ETA: On that topic, I've been thinking about the idea of pride signature buttons for a while. Like the awards, but smaller, like flags or something. I just don't know how feasible that is yet ^^;