This is so stupid. EA changing the narrative and making this issue about sexism.
The main problem ppl have about this game is not that we can play as women. It is about their change in direction. Since a long time Battlefield has been about a more realistic approach to the military shooter genre while CoD was always the more action oriented approach.
Now it seems like EA wants to go after the CoD audience with whacky face paints, edgy prothesis and random samurai swords. It is no wonder that (some) long time fans of the series are upset and make their voice be heard.
This is EAs PR-Team in full throttle and it's sad how many people are eating out of the palm of their hands. I'm 100% sure, if the game was presented differently ppl wouldn't have cared that there are fighting women in the game. Look at battlefront, nobody cared that there are female stormtroopers.
TL/TR: EA are betraying their long term fans to go after the CoD market, long term fans are upset, EA spins the narrative about sexism to discredit those ppl.
This is an intellectually dishonest argument and you know it. The Battlefield games have never strived for heavy realism from the first entry, its later content had jetpacks, rocket powered fighters dogfighting one another, and secret nuclear bases. A series of games that has taken place in the past, present, in a cartoon universe and in the future, just because in your mind or "long time fans" are upset because they think its "historically accurate", well they are wrong. It has always been a stylized, fictionalized and fun playground-esque recreation of war. This entry leans more on the stylized, sure, but its still well within the franchise roots to do so.
The games have regularly featured weapons that wouldn't be available from certain theatres of war being used in others, where we can repair a tank by knocking it with a wrench, heal someone shot in the head by jabbing them with a syringe, jump out of a plane firing a rocket launcher to land safely back into it, and i mean, its a game where 64 players respawn and play a mock game of war. Its make believe, to say we're drawing the line at women being included (which you are downplaying the amount of misogyny that has been thrown at this title), or some customization options for the characters to give it some personality and progression is absolutely ridiculous, and a DICE developer already confirmed you can disable player customization.
The customization is just a way to fund extra content development, which is a far better alternative than fracturing the playerbase with paid content/season passes that will have the expansions die off faster. This will give the game a healthier life.
EDIT: and for the record, a lot of people complained about female Stormtroopers, and female leads in Star Wars films, and black Stormtroopers, and anytime a new female character is announced for Rainbow Six: Siege. Plenty of parts of gaming culture are pretty awful, and incredibly bigoted, as this reveal has shown.
