Blizzard officially stated that World of Warcraft: Shadowlands will bring a major change to character customisation as you will not need to shell out a subscription's worth of money to swap genders.
World of Warcraft offers a ton of customisation for characters which can be done in the barbershops in major cities but they have all been confined to the gender you chose initially. That is unless you were willing to pay $15 / €15 / £13 for the gender change service which is available in the official store.
Shadowlands expansion already offers a lot of new customisation options for 14 races but it appears that's not where the good news stops. John Hight, the executive producer, recently spoke with Eurogamer and unveiled some of Blizzard's philosophy around the character customisation.
He touched on how it previously required payment to alter a character's appearance at all but most of those options were later transferred to the barbershops. Now they apparently realised in some sort of a sudden manner that gender-swapping is the only customisation not available at the barbershop and that they felt like it's not the right message.
While Shadowlands will change that for the better, and everyone will be able to change their characters on the fly, the change will not happen before the expansion. Hight didn't go into detail why that's not going to be happening sooner, only that it can't be fixed before the expansion.
WoWHead
Blizzard
Shadowlands is coming in just a few months and there is still the option to pay for the service on the store page linked above. If you absolutely can't wait that long to customise your character - sure, go ahead and pay for it but we would advise waiting for the expansion regardless.
