Games got marketed hard to boys as the marketing teams seemed to greatly misunderstand the appeal of games in general and therefore the kinds of games that would appeal to most girls.

It's pretty easy to take an existing property, say spiderman or something, and make it into a "boys game" where you focus on action. So the marketing teams thought they could take something like Barbie, and market it as a girls game but with toned down violence or whatever in an attempt to appeal to girls. Usually resulted in something boring that neither girls nor boys wanted to play. Course the problem is they were going about trying to make a "girls game" in the first place rather than just a game.

Most games that do the best with female demographics are indeed the kind of puzzle games, Tetris or whatever, but that's true of the so called "casual gamer" demographic in general of people who don't spend that much time playing or learning more complicated games. I think most of the difference in game use by sex is mostly going to come down to the same reasons why boys are usually more interested in sports. Competition and willingness to devote energy to less social pursuits tend to be more common in males than females, course women do like sports and the top levels of anything is always going to be a bunch of very competitive people so sex does become irrelevant at that point beyond physical differences since it's down more to individual interest and you're far abstracted from the level of large scale sex based trends.

Women as a whole seem to be more interested in games like the Sims or other so called life simulation type games. These have seen a pretty substantial female player base.

Course I think the main thing is open ended games appeal to a wider variety of people since you can play it however you want. If you prefer to play something like Skyrim as s violent criminal thug you can do that, if you want to play it as someone who just goes out and picks flowers and cooks food you can do that. Most people will do some of both, but the wider the game the more likely it's going to appeal to a broader audience which of course will also include women.

Reason why trans-women are overrepresented is because of the internet. Also the gamer phenomenon where the most useless and anti-social types escape into fantasy worlds vs interacting with real life and spend all their time online. So no surprise that gamers that don't really have a life and spend all their time online get sucked into the trans cult.