Maybe this is a hot take but the gendered segregation of bloodsports is just as pants-on-head ridiculous as the gendered segregation of any other sport.
Like. This is a fucking game. Two boxers fighting one another in a ring are two gamers playing a game together. I cannot stress the extent to which boxing, MMA, et al are games created and pursued primarily for idle amusement. Just because the game is happening in a ring as opposed to on a pitch doesn't make it less of a game. We are Playing Toys when we glove up and clobber each other. It is For Fun. They're dangerous games, to be sure, but the danger is the chief source of amusement for the participants and the audience. The boxers wouldn't be boxing if they hated boxing.
"If we did co-ed boxing there would be Men Beating Up Women 😡" Last time I checked a fight requires at least 2 active participants unless you're just beating up on yourself alone like Edward Norton in that movie. And as I said above, I presume nobody would pursue a career in boxing if they didn't like doing the boxing.
And moreover, maybe I'm just a hashtag 90s kid but I grew up being constantly innundated with messages about how girls are just as tough as boys and can do anything boys can do. "Fight like a girl" was an inescapably popular slogan. And it was all very nice and heartwarming and inspirational. So I take serious umbrage with the notion that competing in a co-ed fight league equates to "men beating up women" because, here in the real world, the women would lay out the men just as often as the reverse, and this implicit assumption that women are by majority soft, delicate, helpless creatures simply unfit for participation in physical culture has got to be one of the least feminist things I've ever heard.
Fighting (and weightlifting) would be some of the easiest sports to convert into a co-ed model cause they already have weight classes within the gender segregated versions to keep the sports fair. It really wouldn't be that hard to just combine the two halves into one thing. And this is also what prevents the thing that everyone is so scared of happening from happening. You wouldn't get a massive mountain of a man beating up a tiny woman in co-ed boxing, because they'd be in two different weight classes. If the massive mountain of a man were to fight a woman, he'd be fighting a massive mountain of a woman, and if a the tiny woman were to fight a man, she'd be fighting a tiny man. Thats how these sports already work. (This is also why the argument against letting trans people compete in the gendered categories matching their identities falls flat, people think if you let a trans woman compete in womens boxing that she'd dominate all her opponents, when in reality she'd be in the weight category that ensures her opponents give her fair fights. But that's a different conversation)
The real reason most sports, including fighting, are gender segregated, isn't because men would automatically dominate, quite the opposite actually, it's because the men would not win every single time and would lose to women more often than one would assume. And because our patriarchal society devalues anything women are good at, sports as a whole would be devalued. And that devaluing of womens work, talents, interests, and accomplishments is the real problem that needs to be addressed
