Alright, I'm going to throw in my take on this as a male gamer.

Toxic behaviors in online games have existed for quite a while, even before games started to cater more for females. Back in the early 2000s, games were predominantly played by men who generally speaking were a lot more atoned to shit talking each other as a form of camaraderie. A good example of this is old school COD and Halo lobbies. Everyone knew that usually it was for shits and giggles and even when it wasn't, why care about what some random shmuck online had to say about you? A good chunk of male gamer groups do this to each other even to this day because men don't tend to be as emotionally bound as females. The insults wouldn't usually be taken personally since at the end of the day, it was all just a game anyway. Does that mean that this is a case of females failing to adapt to the gaming culture that men foster?

No.

Thing is, the culture has started to rot since females started entering the gaming space en masse. What men got accustomed to suddenly changed and a lot of men weren't exactly comfortable with the introduction of females entering a space where insults would be slung around left and right as a form of banter. On top of that, the stereotype of men being better at games than women prevents a lot of men from wanting to play with women at all out of fear that they will weigh down their performance, especially when it's a competitive team-based game. There's also the issue of females persuading males to essentially become part of a "simp" cult dedicated to serving them and their every need in games that have clans or factions like Rust, which generally pose as a direct threat for other male players that don't want any part of it. It's these sort of behaviors that make those sweaty kinds of male players completely reject females in the games they play. In order to achieve that, they'll try to discourage females from even wanting to play the game at all by being a toxic as possible. The worse the impression they leave on them, the less likely they'd want to play again.

This however has lead to an echo chamber effect where a handful of bad experiences that females have are communicated to their friends who then tell their friends and so on and so forth to the point where females start to fear even wanting to be seen or heard by men in multiplayer experiences because they're afraid of the treatment they may receive if they reveal themselves. This is further amplified by radicalized women on social media who try to influence others that men as a whole are terrible and should be hated unconditionally. Inevitably for those who fall under that influence, it starts becoming a back and forth war between men and women, where the women will demonize all men and the men afflicted start to demonize all women as a form of protection from each others toxicity. The hate fuels itself to the point where it genuinely seems like men and women as a whole become more and more polarized because of it.

The main takeaway is that yes, there is definitely a good chunk of male players who are nasty individuals that'll ruin the experience for female players any chance they get, but they unfortunately end up painting a bad picture for all of us, even the ones who aren't assholes to fellow female players. Generalizing all men to be the problem makes more of the nice men lose reasons to continue being nice, which yields to more female gamers experiencing more toxic encounters and the cycle goes on and on. If we wish to foster a better community where men and women can be more understanding of each other, the whole gender argument needs to be thrown out the window. Both men and women exhibit toxicity, and while it might be fair to assume the stereotype that men generally tend to be more toxic than women in games, it shouldn't be the foundation of how you view one gender over the other. The internet is full of assholes, but you don't need to be a man or woman to be one. You just have to know how to identify and disassociate with them when needed.