Interesting, thanks for pointing me to the update! :-)
Just for clarification: Did you use only minime and Gear Girl, or were any other mods installed as well? Did you start a new game when this happened?
If you didn't have any other mods installed, the real issue is that you've got the menu at all! I guess that is due to the cut-scene where you don't have a character right from the start. In 0.18, we could safely assume that a player without a character would be in god mode, so I offered a button to switch to the default character. With the cut-scene, this apparently will always trigger when a new game is started. I'll have to look into that.
The other problem is that the Gear Girl character can't be offered for selection. If you still have a saved game from 0.18, try to load it -- if you don't have any other mods providing additional characters, there should be no menu because there is nothing to choose. If you do have additional characters, Gear Girl might be available as Default character.
This is a problem of how Gear Girl character works: The author assumes that his character will be the only one in the game, so he takes the short route of overwriting the main character right from the start. It would be better to create a new character instead, as explained in this thread. You should ask the Gear Girl author for compatibility with minime, because there's really nothing I can do about it: The other character selector mod presented in that thread makes Gear Girl available as a new character by rebuilding it from scratch. (In other words: it doesn't provide compatibility with Gear Girl Character, but replaces it.) My approach is to use what's available and let the character-providing mods in control of how their characters look like, what sounds and animations they use -- they are far better at that anyway! Also, it let's me keep the modsize down (minime: <100KB; Gear Girl: >35MB!) and make the mod more universal and usable with any characters.
