For most international flights that don't involve a US carrier, are not flying to/from/over/within whatever space the US claims as under its sovereign jurisdiction, messing around with the sex, date of birth and passport fields can be done easily. The operating airline can -- if needed -- correct whatever fields need to be corrected at the airport itself for the kind of flights mentioned in this paragraph.

Personally, I don't really care if targets of government surveillance -- that's more or less everybody dealing with the US nowadays in some way or another -- don't mind messing up government databases, if only because it may result in more persons realizing that in the absence of having a guaranteed right to know and correct all information that the government has about an individual which isn't sealed by court order, the government has more power than it needs to function and make the lives of otherwise free people unnecessarily difficult.