Salem

Game starts up and runs fine until i get to the character selection screen, then i get a black screen with just the HUD, then a message saying to talk to someone to change my gender, and then it crashes

aw that's unfortunate. You may try:
-delete the game (not the file, the game directory) and re download it.
-head to the Artifice forum and download either Ender's or Latikai's custom client. optional: install Judaism's minimalism graphic mod, lower the stress on your computer.
-update your java and check your anti-virus to see if it is blocking the game.
Edit: of course, those are blind solutions. You may need to upload your crash report for us to see what happened. The crash report will be in the same directory as the starter file you downloaded, I assume.
Edit2: you're lucky I got here before everyone else.

If it crashes, we need that log before we can really help. There are a few possible causes for crashes at this point. However, any suggestions I make at this point would just be stabbing in the dark. A common issue that shows the way you describe on some GPUs is this thread. The solution for the problem is the post I linked, but if that isn't the problem, it really won't help any (won't hurt any that I'm aware other than wasting time, though).