Genuinely interested: How are gender identity, race, ethnicity, etc. of any relevance in Open Source Projects? Is this a regular topic of discussion besides the code?
They are relevant due to the "people" aspects of projects, as in, the collaborative aspects of the project. I am guessing you are pulling that line from the code of conduct portion of this post. They specifically mention having a committee of several people from different backgrounds so that the can better assess potential breaches in the code of conduct.
As for if this is a regular topic of discussion besides the code, that obviously varies wildly, but I believe it's being discussed more these days.
If you look at some other stories, specifically "Text Rendering Hates You" and "Text Editing Hates You Too", working with non-English languages in text is tough, and it gets harder the farther from English you're working with.
Considering ethnicity is the only way to prioritize issues like that.
As for if this is a regular topic of discussion besides the code, that obviously varies wildly, but I believe it's being discussed more these days.