Gender segregated sports aren’t segregated so women get to play. Sure, a lot of girls benefit from this segregation, but it’s not the reason.

High-skill men, unskilled men, high-skill women, mid-skill women, and unskilled women have historically been kinda fine in letting men and women compete in an equal footing. For man-centric things this means most winners and competitors will be men, but the inverse happens for woman-centric things and nobody really complains.

But mid-skill men doing a man-centric thing absolutely lose it when they lose to high-skill women. Which doesn’t happen a lot, but they lose it loudly enough when it does happen that for anything as trivial as sport it’s easier to just segregate so we can protect the fragile egos of mid-skill men who just can’t handle losing to a woman.