I agree that the concept of displaying "he" or "she" would indeed be an improvement, but I feel as though the only way to get over the awkwardness of the form q

I agree that the concept of displaying "he" or "she" would indeed be an improvement, but I feel as though the only way to get over the awkwardness of the form questions you defined would be to go through some kind of "profile builder". This obviously takes the app to a new place - now talking about some sort of profile system - this would obviously be a huge feature to add with a load of other implications.