XSL ignores my whitespace even with the <xsl:text> tag
You may need the to use...
<xsl:text xml:space="preserve"> Gender: Male </xsl:text>
If you want to output a text file you should specify an <xsl:output method="text"/> as a child of the <xsl:stylesheet> element.
When treating output as HTML the parser might pack your spaces, if HTML output with non-breaking spaces is what you want you can use the   non-breaking space entity (note that might not work since it's not an XML entity, unless you declare it yourself).
This not a strict XSLT question, as XSLT does not eat your white space. This transformation
<xsl:stylesheet xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" version="1.0"> <xsl:template match="/"> <foo> <xsl:text> Gender: Male </xsl:text> </foo> </xsl:template></xsl:stylesheet> gives
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><foo> Gender: Male </foo>You are using HTML as the output? Then use non breaking space for whitespace.