My assumption would be that the gap between Male and Female is much thinner than to the Hardcore option. Thus it's a new option group. And an option group with only one choice is invalid thus is has to be a checkbox.
After the first UI update pass, someone on the forums made this into a meme after they noticed that Crate missed the title screen in the update. The dev team thought it was funny and just left it like that.
game where what gender your character is is based on the difficulty level. Men are easy mode, because of male privilege. Women are medium, they start out with 25% less GP and have a debuff when traveling without a companion NPC at night. Nonbinary people are hard mode, some NPCs will perceive your character as “against the natural order” and attack them, but if they fail the “pronouns” skill check they get a disadvantage.
It's so weird to me that this scene never actually happened in RvB. The first few times I saw this format I could visualize it, I could hear it, but now when I search for it all I get is people who also thought it actually happened.
It's just such a RvB joke, and I swear to god there was a scene where they asked about O'Malley's gender, but I can't find this exchange specifically
To be fair, the left images are from Halo 2 and the ones on the right are from Halo 1, so this exact screengrab wouldn't really be possible to begin with. I'm pretty sure the "doom" meme is a really old Tumblr shitpost that got reposted with different IP/screengrabs over the years (and the RvB one became the popular version?).