Awfully convenient backstory, but who knows. Maybe true.
I don't care if she was literally told she couldn't play. This "story" is being presented to advance a false claim of widespread misogyny and non-acceptance within the hobby.
Even if her anecdotal tale of one single incident that may or may not have taken place the way she recounts it happens to be true what's actually being claimed here is still a lie.
^THIS^
She left out all context and circumstance from the time she was so horribly told that she 'couldn't play'.
The most likely scenario:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/could-dungeons-26-dragons-be-the-next-harry-potter-stranger-things-have-happened/ar-AA12N7Ia
...
“D&D as a game, as a lifestyle has the potential to help people be more comfortable with who they are, express themselves more,” says Williams, who finally got the opportunity to play the game this year, with Cocks as her dungeon master. “It’s amazing how far it’s come since someone first told me I couldn’t play when I was in that basement. I’m super-excited.”
“My very first experience wanting to play Dungeons & Dragons was back in the ’80s,” says the 55-year-old Williams, who grew up amid the tobacco fields of North Carolina, “and there were some of my male friends in a basement, and I wanted to play, and they were like: ‘No, you can’t play. This isn’t for girls.’ I’m really excited that that is no longer the case.”
She was a teenager in the early 80's, probably at a female friends house, and some of the girls brothers friends came over to play D&D.
They were not her "male friends", they were just some boys she knew in high school...
She see's them playing D&D and was like: "Hey I'd like to play!".
So a group of teenaged boys looking to play
their game get asked by a girl that
they obviously didn't want around at the moment if she could play too...
Of course they kicked her to the curb!
Naturally in her mind: one group of
teenaged boys in a basement = all evil straight white male D&D players ever.
This article was a good thing. It showed that Cynthia Williams is not above being a disingenuous to serve her own ends.