Sounds like an animation bug. Some rare combination of character creator traits makes a transition fail to find its animation which would cause the transition (i.e. shooting) to fail as well, if it's animation-driven. Probably other traits they could change on their character than the gender to fix it (i.e. maybe height/weight), but gender is enough of a major change to be a consistent fix.

Sounds like the kind of bug that would be difficult to identify, but easy to fix, so here's hoping they get it in the first patch.