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You can write the story from the viewpoint of characters who do not know the gender of the main character. If you want the reader to care and to wonder, use viewpoint characters who care and wonder.
You can sometimes use little tricks to briefly delay revealing information that a viewpoint character discovers or realizes. But that works only briefly. And only a few times in a novel.
If you write in the viewpoint of someone who knows the MC's gender, and who would normally think about that gender consciously, the only way to hide that information is to use a distant viewpoint. But using a distant viewpoint will… uh… keep the reader distant from that viewpoint. And that will almost certainly leave the reader caring less about the characters than you want them to.
Another trick, which readers tend to hate, and some of us (Hi! I'm Dale!) hate with a deep and abiding passion, is to become suddenly vague every time the detail comes up. We're deeply in the character's viewpoint, seeing and hearing and feeling and following every minute detail of what they're experiencing. And then suddenly we go all vague and abstract.
Readers feel that, even if they don't know why. They're reacting to the author's intrusive hand, rather than to what the characters are experiencing.
Dan Brown pulls viewpoint shenanigans like that all the time.
For example, his most recent novel Inferno has several scenes where the same close-viewpoint character thinks of self using different names (actually, a name in some scenes, and a number in others).
Oh, I hate that. I consider it authorial malpractice of the highest order.
But I couldn't stop reading.
So Dan Brown commits every authorial felony in the book to hide viewpoint characters' information from readers. But I don't think he's ever tried to sustain that over the course of a whole novel.
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