I think it would be great if we could have the option of changing our gender and maybe having an option in one of the menus for changing our names ourselves without going to the web client.

Hello,
unless I am mistaken, you already asked about gender and got a reply from Aminiel why this is hard to do and manage with all the different translations.
The topic is at https://qcsalon.net/en/forum6/topic66421

As for changing the username, it could be easily abused. Since there are more active helpers now the requests are treated much faster.

The gender part enough has been said. However if there could be an option to change usernames within the menus with helpers still giving approval as they do now would be more helpful for many people than the present system. There are still quite a few people who don't know how to change their username.