I honestly, just to weigh in on this a bit more, think that the body of said neutral character has to be something that isn't human in order to work. Just having a mismatched sort of gender, or a character who looks like one gender but is actually another, doesn't really meet the whole gender neutral criteria as much as people would like to think it does. As others have stated, we have some cultures with more then 2 genders, of which the transsexual variety could fall under. So to me, if it can be classified as being part of an identified gender, it doesn't really possess a gender neutral identity, its just a gender that doesn't exist in the older english language.
The reason I choose a suit of armor with a entity occupying it was because, a suit of armor doesn't have any sort of biological sex, and can be made gender neutral in aesthetics a lot easier then a body of flesh and blood could. I don't know a lot of people who look at a suit o armor and go, "that's a boy or that's a girl or that's something in between" when they see it. In my opinion shale worked well because shale's body wasn't set more one way then the other, at least to me. It was a golem, and it physically did not possess a sex and by extention a gender. The spirit part was because spirits exist in a realm where they don't have a need for gender, and so wouldn't have any sort of concept of the sort to have to play on. It'll just exist, and not be a male who looks female, a female who looks male, a male who acts like a female, a female who acts like a memeber, or any other sort of mix that is already defined and named within the modern language. It'll just be, as it is, undefined by any of our own standards in both body and in spirit.
At least that's my own two cents on the matter.
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