Do you draw your character randomly or can you chose which to use and then shuffle the deck.
I presume 'draw' even if thematically it is somewhat more logical to pick the same gender.

I'm pretty sure the term 'replace' isn't covered in the rules anywhere, but I would say you play it as 'discard one character and recruit one arcane character'. So that would mean drawing the arcane character randomly. Seems like ascending could change your gender as easily as it can change everything else about you.

I think that anima rules questions used to be directed to a forum run by the designers at http://www.animaforum.edgeent.com/ , but that link is no good anymore and edgeent.com seems to be fantasy flight's webpage in Spanish or French.