@president_barackbar: I'd start then by looking into your local scene for casual tournaments in whatever your game of choice is. If you can't find one, then you would probably have to gauge interest and try organizing one yourself, like what the Smash Sisters TOs did.
@president_barackbar: Except that's not the message at all. Smash Sisters isn't about how bad the FGC is, it's about how amazing it can be when you separate out the bad seeds. They're not trying to remove the women already active in the FGC, they're trying to bridge the gap so that newer female players dont have to jump right into the shark tank before they can even figure out if competitive Smash is a thing for them.
And you totally could create your own tournament and organize it in a way to ensure the safety of the entrants and participants.
Strange to see so many people against a women only tournament but not against the basic, disgusting, behavior that forces so many women out.
I was just proposing a hypothetical situation to point out that if a male felt like the mainstream FGC events were too hostile an environment and tried to create a male version of the Smash Sisters, it would be decried as sexism. To your second point, I think stuff like this hinges on the assumption that tournament organizers either don't care about not creating a toxic environment or actively encourage it, neither of which seems to be the case to me. To your last point, the point a lot of us who disagree are making is that rather than splitting off and making a separate female only tournament, it would be better for the people involved with Smash Sisters to advocate for a less toxic FGC environment rather than "giving up" on it and going it alone.
But... if the predominantly male FGC is too hostile for a player... how would creating a men-only tournament in any way fix that? How does excluding female players suddenly negate that hostility? "I'm in a room with 1000 bees and 5 butterflies and the bees keep stinging me so my solution is to get rid of the butterflies."
The reason they made Smash Sisters was to guarantee (or get closer to guaranteeing) a safe space for female players to enjoy the game without having to worry about sexist behavior from the bad seeds in the FGC.
Of course no TO wants a toxic environment, but there is literally zero ways for them to monitor every attendee of their events, let alone police them. Even if a female player was able to summon up the courage to report a player for behaving inappropriately (and there are about a billions sad truths about society that pressure a woman not to report harassment), what TO has the time/bandwidth to actually investigate the situation and take action? There is no easy solution.
Which is kinda the whole point of this article that you seem to be missing. No one is "giving up" on anything. Smash Sisters is not the end-game. All it is is an experiment to try and get more women, who might not have had the courage to enter a regular tournament, into trying competitive Smash, and to increase awareness of the issues that are tied to being a female competitor in the FGC. It has been 100% successful in both regards.
When the figureheads of these communities (the big names, the organizers etc) are encouraging inclusion saying that women aren't accepted and are unwelcome is kind of untrue.
They're not saying that though. They're saying there are very real, very true issues that only female players have to deal with, and even if they come from a small pocket of the community, they are big enough issues that it's more than reasonable for any female player feel uncomfortable about entering the FGC gen pop.
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