After wasting 2 complete afternoons on this, I've finally found a way to make it work … sort of. I say “sort of” because I'm fooling the game into thinking my character is male as far as dialogs and cutscenes are concerned. While my Shepard's appearance and voice remains female, this does create 2 small problems :
1-Npcs refer to my character as male. Most dialog in the game works for both gender so that doesn't happen very often, but it's still annoying.
2-During cutscenes (like the cutscene that triggers when you find the beacon on Eden Prime), my character uses the male voice. Again, it doesn't happen often but it's very distracting when it does.
Also, I've only done Therum, Feros and Noveria so far, still need to do Virmire and Ilos. It seems to work so far, and every romance dialog option I've selected has used the female voice, which confirms that they had intended to allow female Shepard to romance Ashley at first, but since I haven't finished the game yet, I can't confirm that it's 100% functionnal.
Now for the meaty part of the post : There are 2 ways to achieve this, one easy but restrictive, and one a bit more difficult but that allows you to use a custom face. Let's start with the easy way.
There's a nice little console command called SetGender that can be used to switch the gender of your character on the fly. SetGender 0 makes you male, and SetGender 1 makes you female. Problem is, this only affects your character's appearance and voice, the game uses another value to determine if the npcs see you as male or female.
This means that for this method to work, you need to start your game as a male character and once you're in the game, open the console and type SetGender 1. You'll then have to save your game and reload to see the changes. If it worked, you character should now have the female appearance. The issue with this method is that you can't use a custom appearance for your character (well you can, but the results will be quite disturbing). Unless you have the default face, using SetGender will only change your body, and your character will retain his custom face.
There is a way around that problem, but it requires hex editing your savegame. Here's how to do it :
First, start your game as a female character, and create your custom face. As soon as you're in the game, save and then exit Mass Effect. Go to your savegames directory, find the game you just saved (YourCharacterName00_01.MassEffectSave) and copy it somewhere (that's your backup in case things go horribly wrong!).
Once that's done, you'll need to extract the contents of your savegame file using a Zip utility. 7-Zip works, not sure about the others. You should now have access to the 3 files which make up a MassEffectSave file, namely player.sav, state.sav and WorldSavePackage.sav.
Open state.sav with your favorite hex editor, and change the value of the 27Ath (634 in decimal) byte to 00 (the value should be 80 if your character is female) to make the game think your character is male. Save your changes, then select the 3 .sav files, do a right-click and select “Send to” --> “Compressed folder” to re-zip then.
Rename the zip to YourCharacterName00_02.MassEffectSave and now open both your unchanged MassEffectSave file and the one you've just created in your hex editor. You'll need to copy the first 2027 (8231 in decimal) bytes from the old file to the start of the new one to make it a valid MassEffectSave file.
Once the changes are saved, copy your new file to your Mass Effect savegame directory and try to load it. If all went well, your character should still have the same look and voice, but should now be considered male by npcs, which allows your female Shepard to romance Ashley.
Edit : this was tried with brand new savegames. The structure of state.sav seems to change a lot depending on where you are in the game, so I'm not sure how to do it mid-game.
I haven't tried it, but you could probably also use this method to romance Kaidan as a male character.
Also, doing this will probably cause problems if you eventually try to import that character in ME3, because they probably won't record lines for the FemShep/Ashley romance in ME3. Not sure about ME2, since there's isn't much dialog with her anyway.
Whew, long post, gonna go play some Mass Effect now. I'll update this thread once I can confirm that the whole romance works.
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Edit:
As per McBaal's suggestion, I'm adding a link to another thread started by someone who had trouble getting this to work. The thread contains additional tips, explanations and screenshots, so check it out if you're having difficulties with this or aren't sure on how to proceed.
Here's the link:
social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/103/index/4954821
Bearbeitet von The King of Dust, 27 Juli 2011 - 05:06 .
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, I've played around 10 times with a female character and I've never been able to romance Ashley. Yet the first time I played with a male character, I had no trouble romancing her. Maybe you're confusing Ash with Liara? Either that or the platinum edition on the 360 is awesome, and I gotta get my hands on it to try to rip the files and see if they work with the PC version 
. If you get it working, I'd be nice if you could come back to this thread and give us the good news 
