she just wished there were more female characters she could relate to

You have a point, recently there was a thread on the Overwatch subreddit where the linked article claimed that many women looked into being able to relate to a character.

To me (and a lot of gamers) that sounds strange, since we don't look at characters that way. We look at "is this character fun to play". I don't relate to (Overwatch: Tracer, Sombra, Ana, Widow), but to their roles (mobile or scoped snipers). Just the same I didn't relate to Scout and Sniper in Team Fortress 2 (same roles), even though they were men. I probably would trace that back to Quake (mobility in general) where I liked the railgun (basically a sniper rifle with no projectile travel time) - I usually picked Slash in Q3A for her seemingly smaller hitbox.

Gamergate in general is a bungled mess of politics. Some part I agree with (like "if you are friends with the creator of the game please mention it in your review"), some parts I don't ("women are taking our toys").