What's going on is that the
complainant xirself is indirectly letting us know that xir complaint didn't have any ground to stand on. Xey went straight to the Foundation
precisely as a ploy to bypass the community's well-established due process, knowing full well that any bureaucracy of that sort would naturally "hid[e] the complaint in a shroud of secrecy"! It's not so much about xem being a woman - though that certainly can't hurt xem, I guess - and more about the political games that xey're overty playing. Quite disgraceful, all around.
Added: I'm not sure that we can know why the Foundation chose to act on this basis. It could have been personal in the way you imply, but this was a controversial editor who had strongly opposed Foundation initiatives before (Media view, Visual Editor, "next-gen" discussion platform to replace wiki-like talk pages, etc.) So I'd rather not speculate - the Foundation didn't need anything more than a flimsy pretext, and a formal complaint could certainly serve that purpose.