Not in our games, we had quite a few female gamers and they almost all played females.
But we did kinda look askance at guys who played females- but that was the 70’s. We grew out of that.
I think they7 should name the species lolth 
More from my friend mentioned above:
It’s worth noting that the very slight strength limitation mentioned above was the only one imposed on female characters (naturally, there was no limitation at all on female players), and if you wanted to keep the strength score you’d rolled by playing as a man, that would hardly be out of the ordinary. Many players did and still do play as a member of the opposite sex (if you can even say that in $CurrentYear), and since you could very well be playing as a member of a different species, why ever not? I can, however, think of at least two AD&D monsters that had disadvantageous effects on men, specifically: the Dryad could use a powerful charm person spell either because she was threatened or because she had spotted a male with a very high charisma (and this meant the charmed character being taken away for several campaign years, by rule-as-written, which would be a permanent goodbye to the character for all practical purposes); and some seaweedy-type monster whose name escapes me – “kelpie”, I think, and if so, it must be in the Fiend Folio which I can’t find for the moment – could hypnotise seafarers and drown them… but not women. Then, while looking for the kelpie and not finding her in Monster Manual II , I stumbled across the foxwoman, who could auto-charm any male of only average or lower wisdom, and the sirine, whom no man could look at and even want to harm. Of course the succubus’s famous level-draining kiss was a horny guy trap, pure and simple. Monsters that targeted women? – none that I can think of.
Those of us who were playing AD&D in the 1980s were all of us excited to see the Unearthed Arcana sourcebook introduce many new spells, items and playable races, including the dark elves or “drow”. Female drow PCs had a number of advantages - innate magical abilities for a start, but that wasn’t all of it from what I recall - that threw the tiny, usually-theoretical cap on female human strength into sharp relief. Our response, as I recall, wasn’t to cry sexism but to see if we felt like playing a female drow, and I remember “Lady Linda”, my drow cavalier, kicking all kinds of ass. 
In the early 80s Roger Moore (he of TSR, not the James Bond actor) published an essay called “Dungeons Aren’t For Men Only”, which gave men a thorough scolding for their sexist attitudes, some of it deserved. He also wrote a vignette in which a bunch of braggarts in a fantasy tavern were silenced by a mocking woman who trumped all their aces by declaring “My husband is the Dungeon Master”. Too bad that this carried a clear message that he probably didn’t intend: it doesn’t matter what you do, only whom you are permitting to sleep with you.
As to other aspects of wokeness: I’ve always been happy enough with the game as it was, and I didn’t feel it needed to be transformed into “Sewers and Social Workers”. Possibly some adventures and story arcs benefit from rehabilitating the odd bad guy, but that I think is as far as it needs to go. If the majority of your monsters aren’t giving the PCs a darned good reason to roll for initiative, they’re not monstrous enough, and you’re just telling stories about humans in funny clothes. NTTAWWT, but I’m of a fairly simple turn of mind when it comes to what I expect from a game that spun off from miniatures wargaming with a fantasy twist. Equally, I have played Squad Leader and its derivatives, and I never once felt that what it needed was a rules mechanic whereby a bunch of Germans and Russians could sit down together over a nice cup of acorn coffee and set up an anarcho-syndicalist collective in the Crimea and to hell with Hitler and Stalin both.
For my money society generally owes RPGers more in view of wrongs visited on their good name than RPGers do to those who didn’t find the game woke enough. RPGers generally, males in particular, have been fair game for all manner of taunts for as long as the hobby has existed. I could wax lyrical about an incident from The Big Bang Theory, for a start. 
Yep, that’s exactly what we are talking about here. Your friend has sliced through the Gordian knot of race relations and hacked our woke hearts in twain. Forsooth! I am slain.
I’m sorry, who is this guy, and why are we supposed to care about his opinion?
I have a very mild desire to point out how little he understands about sexism, but it is overwhelmed by the complete lack of desire to debate someone who isn’t here to reply.
I don’t know if “Women had it easier because there were all sorts of sexy, sexy lady-monsters trying to murder-fuck our male characters” is as compelling an argument as he thought.
Before anyone is quick to play down apparently out-of-place or irrelevant sexist and racist rules in the rulebook, do things like “female characters have their strength capped” occur in any non-D&D rules? If not, it may be legitimate to conclude something about the mindset of that author. If yes or if it is common, we can draw even more depressing conclusions.
In GURPS, isn’t there a simple rule like 1 strength costs 10 points?
That was an era of a bajillion 3rd party games all riding off AD&D’s popularity and half of them were striving to be as “realistic” and crunchy as possible so I would be shocked if rules disadvantaging (or even disallowing) women characters weren’t included in some.
Except that there is nothing realistic and crunchy about such rules in this context. If many other designers were “inspired” by D&D rules, though, then we can see how it might have sneaked in more than it would have otherwise.
Meanwhile, the current position seems to be “OK, that woke stuff is too hard for us to do; you all go do all the woking for us.”. The most recent adventure book, Candlekeep Mysteries, doesn’t specify genders for most of the NPCs, and says for you to decide on a gender for each of them. Which, of course, is mostly going to result in a whole bunch of DMs defaulting to male, just like the writers did (oh, did I mention that whenever they slip up and accidentally include a pronoun, it’s always “he”?).
Or maybe it’s just that specific book that sucks. There are a lot of other issues with it, completely aside from gender or diversity issues.
… you ever hear of FATAL?
Yep. …
Hopefully, he hasn’t. And I urge him, for the sake of his sanity, to not look for any more information about it than what you and I have just revealed. Trust me on this.
I agree, however:
There’s absolutely no way to prevent GMs from changing genders, sexual orientations and races, for the simple reason that they’re usually the only ones who’ve read the adventure. You won’t be able to completely remove sexism and bigotry from tabletop RPGS, because the GMs and players bring it with them. The best you can do is not give them any excuses.
Aargh! Flashbacks!
I put realistic in quotes for a reason. It’s the sort of realistic where someone says “Well, the strongest man in the world can deadlift more than the strongest woman in the world” which might technically be true but isn’t a basis upon which to build a game system.
I disagree about it not being crunchy. Adding all sorts of fiddly modifiers based on largely irrelevant criteria in the name of “realism” is a definite branch of crunch.
Oh, sure, there are going to be some DMs who make all of the important NPCs male because they’re sexist pricks who can’t accept the possibility of women wielding power. There’s nothing you can do about those guys.
But there are also going to be DMs who make all of the NPCs male because they’ve just never given it any thought, and because their “default character” is male. That second group, if you give them a published adventure that says that the chief scholar of Candlekeep (or whoever) is female, they just might stop and say “Huh, now that you mention it, why shouldn’t she be?”.
And yeah, you’re also going to have DMs who change the gender of one specific NPC because they want to set them up as a potential love interest for a character of established sexual orientation, or because they’re merging them with another character who’s already shown up in their world, or just because their conception of that particular character happens to match that gender. That’s fine. That sort of thing is clearly covered under a DM’s powers, and there’s no harm in putting a reminder of that in the adventure. But you still ought to explicitly specify default genders for the important NPCs, and make sure they’re reasonably demographically representative.
Speaking of “crunchiness,” I recently started becoming familiar with the “narrative dice” systems of Genesys/Star Wars and Fate Core, and I really, really, really love this concept. It makes me want to go to my D&D DM and say we ought to adapt this concept for D&D.
I don’t know if anyone in the history of AD&D actually played using all the rules as written. My group didn’t use the racial maximums for human women characters, not that we had any human women actually playing back then, but any race that had a penalty to an attribute took that penalty. So I wonder how many groups actually used the maximum strength rule for human women? Whether or not it was frequently used, it was still a bad rule of course. Totally unnecessary.
I’m not exactly happy with every change WotC has made to D&D over the years. I’m still bitter about Paladins not having to be Lawful Good but then alignment will soon be a thing of the past I think so I need to get over it. But D&D has changed several times over the years. D&D in 2014 wasn’t the same as it was in 2004, was different in 1994, and different still in 1984. D&D is constantly being tweaked in order to remain relevant to contemporary audiences. As a “mature” individual in my mid-40s, I realize I’m no longer the target demographic for D&D. I may not be happy with every change WotC has made over the years but but D&D is still a good game. And I’m comfortable knowing I’m not the target audience.
GURPS is a little different in that you build your character from scratch with a specific set of points. If you wanted to model the strength difference between men and women with your character you’d probably just give her a 9 Strength (-10 points) and go from there. Just picking a gender in GURPS didn’t result in any penalty.
Pendragon is an RPG heavily inspired by Arthurian legend, specifically Mallory, and as originally envisioned each character would play a knight with female characters relegated to typical feudal roles. At the time, when women rolled their statistics they were weaker and smaller than men but they weren’t expected to do any fighting. In the 5th edition of the game, which came out in 2005, women knights just rolled statistics the same way male knights would.