For those wondering about the cross dressing thing, I don't think it's a major issue, if they decide to implement it.
If I can cast your minds back to Lightning, she was created by with the simple concept of "make a female looking Cloud".
So, we have a cross dressing Lightning covered already previous in 2012, besides the hair:
It looks fairly natural/seemless in my eyes. I don't think it'll be hard to come up with something similar on Cloud if we reverse the idea and slap on some female clothes on him, plus a wig of some form. It'll be entirely unrealistic, but hey it's a game.
Regarding the remake, 2017 is quite an early date (Jan 31st 1997 was the first release date of FFVII). So maybe they're trying to bang on hit 31st Jan 2017 to be a true anniversary? Is it right to assume that they've been working on this for a while? Until gameplay is released, I cannot tell if this would have the same scale as FFXV (in terms of playable area/fleshyness of it) because due to how many times FFXV has been delayed along with how there's no concrete release date for it, it's a bit mind boggling how they can choose to remake FFVII now on top of FFXV. Or we if assume a "direct" remake, it may have freed a lot of "constraints" designers would have and therefore allow them to accelerate the development?