UPDATE: May 9, 2017, 10:39 a.m. EDT A group of trolls say they posed as a transgender team to dupe esports tournament organization ESL and, later, BuzzFeed News.

ESL, which hosts Counter-Stike: Global Offensive tournaments — some of which are only open to women — currently requires a passport or other government-issued ID to prove the gender of each teammate participating in the tournament. This, the organization said, was to prevent against the numerous men who were attempting to troll the tournament by posing as women.

Someone using the name Sly Buehl Rigilio, who appears to be a member of a trolling group that goes by the name Rigatoni Family, told BuzzFeed News that they were a group of transgender women who were denied entry because they could not present the necessary documents to assuage ESL's concerns about trolls. Though the group's aim was to embarrass the media and poke fun at ESL's attempt to foster a community of professional women gamers, they unknowingly helped the ESL identify issues both with their credential process as well as the way their representatives handle that process.

After Rigilio went to BuzzFeed and news spread, ESL decided to look into how to revise its rules so transgender women who have not had the opportunity to go through the bureaucratic process of updating their official documents can still have a chance to compete in a tournament among fellow gamers they identify with.

The group taking credit for the trolling, Rigatoni Family, appears to be a small collective of trolls with a very small online presence. The group's website turns your computer cursor into crosshairs and rewards you with food stamps if you shoot white people. The group's YouTube page can be summed up by its featured video titled "Rigatoni Family - White Pride" where the members troll and harass people in various online games.

On Steam, it appears the trolls are members of the closed community group called Rigatoni Family. Some of the members' profiles are private, some show that they have been banned previously, some contain hateful language, and some have received comments complaining about their online trolling.

It doesn't seem like much of a stretch that this group would attempt to troll ESL and BuzzFeed in the manner described above. Fortunately, some good came of it despite their best efforts.

UPDATE: May 9, 2017, 6:26 p.m. EDT ESL's director of communications Anna Rozwandowicz responded with this statement, emphasis mine:

We’re relieved to see that no legitimate competitors in this third-party event were barred from participating, and we deeply condemn the behavior exhibited by the team in question. Despite the fact that the ESL policy worked and has prevented trolls from signing up and playing in the tournament, this incident did highlight that our process is imperfect. It could just as easily have unnecessarily impacted a team that was genuinely trying to compete.

There’s always a balance of sanctity of a tournament and erecting too many barriers to competition, which we’re currently revisiting internally. We remain committed to creating and fostering an all-inclusive, all-supportive esports environment as much as we remain committed to safeguarding competitive integrity of our tournaments and events. We are happy to work with AnyKey on creating policies that make female tournaments accessible to all women, and as we move forward in this process, we will revisit internal policies regarding customer communication, customer care and partner requirements for hosting events on our platforms.

The original article is as follows:

Sly Buehl Rigilio, a trans Counter-Strike player from Italy, told BuzzFeed that she and her team signed up for this season's Female Open, a tournament organized by Munich Finest Gaming and hosted by ESL. This is the response Rigilio received from ESL via email:

Your request to join the CS:GO 5on5 Female Open Summer 2017 has been rejected.

The reason for this is:

"No males are allowed. Please take care fake your gender can be penalized." (sic)

Should this reason no longer be valid, feel free to submit a new request.

The email nearly brought Rigilio to tears, she told Buzzfeed.

"Here I am thinking we finally have a shot to shine and show our true colours to the gaming world," she said. "And then we get shut down based on our looks, because we didn't look 'female' enough for them."

Rigilio reached out to Munich Finest Gaming looking for a reason for her team's rejection. The organization responded by saying that the team needed to send in pictures of the players' passports that say they are female.

The rules on the tournament page confirm this:

Every team that has five female players has the right to play. Due to the specific restriction of this tournament, only female players are allowed to play. If we are not sure about the gender of any player we will need an official documentation stating a players' gender is female. All teams globally can participate, but must provide one official document if requested.

The team had less than 24 hours to send in the photos, but not everyone had gone through the process of updating their official documents to reflect their identity.

"Some of us have already started [hormone replacement therapy], and some others are fairly new to coming out and expressing themselves as a female," Rigilio told BuzzFeed. "I know some of the girls in the group have yet to go through the trouble of getting their info changed on [their passports], so we are out of luck."

ESL's director of communications Anna Rozwandowicz (speaking on behalf of Munich Finest Gaming, as well) said that the tournament's rules and passport requirements stem from problems with trolling men who try to enter women-only tournaments. She specifically mentioned that all other teams had to abide by the same requirements.

"As 99% of all competitions happens online, you can rest assured that we deal with trolls, fakers and poser all the time — the number of times we had to negate the results of an online cup, or disqualify a team for straight out lying to us about their identity, age, gender, or location, is higher than I would want it to be, personally," Rozwandowicz said. "As female tournaments are meant to help develop and support the female esports scene, we are extra careful to triple-check that those who want to participate in female tournaments, are also eligible to do so."

Rozwandowicz made it clear that the team of women who were denied entrance into the Female Open were not targeted because they are transgender. The issue, she emphasized, was with not being able to provide necessary identification.

That's where the problem lies, though. The rule inherently discriminates against transgender players because of that extra, bureaucratic step of getting their gender officially changed on government-issued IDs. If the source of the problem is men who are trolling the tournament and organization, it's unfair to put the burden of proof on women who are qualified and should be welcome in the event. Whatever the solution to the credential process may be, the tactless response by the ESL representative is the perfect example of how not to interact with your women and trans community of players.

Rozwandowicz said ESL and Munich Finest Gaming recognize that, and recognize the poorly-worded response of the admin that denied the team's entrance.

"I've taken steps internally to ensure that we refresh their customer care/customer service training," she said.

On top of that, ESL is working with its partner, AnyKey — an organization that aims to create fair and inclusive spaces in esports for marginalized members of the gaming community — to review the Female Open tournament's guidelines and work on changing them where needed.