I don't know if anyone has posted that it's wrong to have any games where gender has an impact. But some people have concerns about settings where "realism" penalizes women characters. If you didn't want this to be part of the discussion you probably shouldn't have brought up stat penalties in the first place.
I don't think the question of stat penalties is particularly interesting. It's a D&D centric approach to mechanics, and one of several systems you could use. I don't really care about the mechanical details, since I think that would end up creating a proxy argument where we acted like we cared a great deal about the mechanical details and spent a lot of time arguing about them, but really we cared or didn't care about something more fundamental. So let's ignore the exact mechanical process, and just assume that there exists some game where sex is an early choice in the chargen process and it ultimately impacts in some fashion the character so that you get different results on average or in the extremes depending on which biological sex you took.
Lets also leave out the question of 'equality'. While that's an interesting question, feminism has never been based on the idea that men and women are equal in capability much less in all capabilities, but rather that they are equally valuable as men and equally deserving of protection by the law and of all rights to pursue their own happiness. As Thaddeus Stevens put it regarding a different question of equality, "How can I hold that all men are created equal when here before me stands, stinking, the moral carcass of the gentleman from Ohio, proof that some men are inferior, endowed by their Maker with dim wits, impermeable to reason, with cold, pallid slime in their veins instead of hot, red blood! You are more reptile than man, George! So low and flat that the foot of man is incapable of crushing you...Yet even you, Pendleton, who should have been gibbeted for treason long before today. Even worthless, unworthy you ought to be treated equally before the law! And so again, sir, again and again and again I say, I do not hold with equality in all things, only with equality before the law." So let's dispense with concerns about whether the characters made according to those choices are equal, since how could we possibly measure that anyway. All we really know about the characters is that they are different in some fashion. Perhaps only women characters can be novelists and only male characters can be master swordsmen. If we are playing D&D, this might not be that interesting - because D&D tends to be about killing things and taking their stuff and I've yet to see a player conceive that they want to play a novelist. But in some other game, maybe this is interesting, even if and maybe because it isn't equal.
I don't know if anyone has posted that it's wrong to have any games where gender has an impact. But some people have concerns about settings where "realism" penalizes women characters.
These two statements seem to me to be in contradiction. As far as I'm concerned, if there is ever a time where gender has an impact, it better darn well be because of realism. If it's not because of realism, then I would consider it sexism. But on the other hand, there seems to be people on the board that go beyond saying, "It's a fantasy. It doesn't need to be realistic." And they also seem to go beyond say, "It's Conan. That portrayal was not strictly inspired by realism, and on the contrary depicts women in a fantasy manner that is often though perhaps not always demeaning and degrading to many if not all women." If that was all that was being said, I'd be in full agreement.
But now I do ask, are there some here saying it is wrong to have a game where the choice of sex matters? Are there some here who are saying realism requires the choice of sex to not matter? If there are, I don't intend to argue that topic. I just want to understand whether that is really what is going on.