• This is deeply stupid.
  
  
• A girl gamer showed up in an online Overwatch competition.  Previously unknown but extremely good.
  
  
• Other gamers suspected that "Ellie" was really a well-known male gamer.
  
  
• The gaming press went ballistic on the intrinsically misogynistic nature of gaming.
  
  
• "Ellie" was revealed to be exactly the well-known male gamer others had suspected.
  
  
• The gaming press went ballistic on the intrinsically misogynistic nature of gaming.
  
  
• No, really.
  
  

The 'Ellie' situation is worse than even the most pessimistic initial reports.

It is also clear that whenever someone tries to use the 'social experiment' card, that means they have been caught doing things they were not suppose to do and are either trying to avoid the consequences/punishments or trying to mitigate the consequences/punishments.

The male gamer playing as Ellie is Punisher, who was clearly known for his habit of making smurf accounts to troll and grief other players in Overwatch.  It is very infuriating for people playing ranked, ladder matches seeing a team mate throw the game.  It is absolutely disastrous if  that happens in competitive matches, where a team's reputation and position are on the line - in no small part because the worst performing teams in Overwatch Contenders each season will be relegated to sent down to the lower tier league.

It is clear Punisher was trying a different variation of a smurf account to troll and grief, except I do not think he expected for Ellie to join a Contenders team - unlike many/most other teams in Contenders, Second Wind's main approach to player recruitment was to look at ranked players on the ladder and ask them to join - a facet of a very informal structure which has given them other problems as well, some of which led to the Ellie fiasco.

Any good player in a multi-player online game, especially one as competitive as Overwatch, will have a digital footprint that people can see, from gameplay footage of the matches they were involved in to people who had played with them.  No one simply starts out performing like a pro, unless they are already a pro.  That is why other players immediately suspected Punisher right from the get-go, because of how Ellie played and what Punisher had done before.

Anyone trying to use 'social experiment' should immediately be judged guilty and hit with scorched earth-level punishment.  Unfortunately for Punisher, he pulled his crap on a game run by arguably the most unforgiving company involved in online gaming.  Blizzard does not screw around when someone throw crap inside a profit center - they are definitely on the 'death penalty guilty until proven innocent' side of online moderation.  The unpleasant bit is that Blizzard will probably punish the female players who were involved, too (Ellie was, by all accounts, not the only one involved with Punisher.), though some of them may not understood what happened until the storm hit.