![]() A female named Beta existed back in the slave days under Quintesson rule, and thus it seems clear females were produced alongside the males as part of the Quintessons' product lines. Within this continuity, female Transformers are a rarity, but established to have been around from the species' start. įiction Generation 1 The Transformers cartoon When the Cybertron dubbers wanted to make a male character into a female one, it's probably not a surprise that they went with the (relatively) sleek racing car. Humans are just conditioned to associate certain looks like certain genders. That was dropped to make it more visually clear that these were the female characters. Plans were afoot to make two look less visually 'female' and more like "the default Cybertronian design" so readers wouldn't know they were female until their dialogue. The main real-world reason for all this can be seen from IDW Publishing's plans to introduce more women in 2014. ![]() There are some exceptions, most notably the recently introduced Strongarm and her distinctly boxy shape. Numerous female characters from the Aligned and Movie lines would turn into motorbikes, giving them thinner, daintier dimensions in robot mode. This, however, has dropped away in more recent years as toy technology changes. Perhaps the best counter-example of this type is Strika, who is female yet neither looks nor acts stereotypically feminine at all. Characters with toys could have been bulky and less overtly human-female-like, which was seen in the Unicron Trilogy series and some latter expansions of the Generation 1 series out of Japan, when the characters are often assigned to pre-existing "masculine" toys. Often they have a more than passing resemblance to a slender human female made of metal and wearing armor and kibble. In almost all cases female Transformers are portrayed as comparatively more graceful of form, and more rounded and curved in general, than their male counterparts. The appearance of female Transformers in most continuities would seem to suggest a level of "sexual" dimorphism is present in at least the more humanoid members of the Transformers species (the term sexual is used in a gender-based, rather than physical sense, see the reproduction link above for that whole kettle of robo-fish). The jury is still out whether Lugnut loves her more than Megatron. This is the first instance "mech" has been used to specifically refer to a male Transformer, whereas the term has been used as a gender-neutral common noun for Transformers in various stories.Īlternative words to denote a female Transformer, all used about twice in canon, include: femme-bot, fembot, girl-bot robot dame, and perhaps robotessa. Both terms have recently appeared in a piece of official fiction: Venus magazine. 3.1.6 Dreamwave Generation One continuityĪlmost assuredly as a consequence of their rarity in official fiction and toylines, female Transformers are popular in fan fiction, where the term " femme" is often used to describe them, with " mech" likewise being applied to "male" Transformers.That's part of a way bigger argument for gender equality in entertainment and society at large that's a bit beyond this wiki's scope to fully explore.Ī list of female Transformers from all continuities is available. There's still a long way to go, since they ARE still uncommon compared to the "guys" and as Mairghread Scott pointed out, this can inadvertently make any given female Transformer and their stories seem like a comment on real women. Nowadays, female Transformers are basically considered a normal part of the Cybertronian population. While they are still comparatively rare, as the years went on they have increased greatly in numbers, prominence, and overall fairness of representation, and are considered an official part of the Transformers brand in pretty much every continuity. and some of those had been originally designed as toys for male characters or were portrayed as male in some cartoon markets. Thanks, 1980s! Always so sensitive! Well into the third decade of the brand, the number of female characters to have received either mass retail toy releases or recurring cartoon appearances was still in the single digits. Despite being robotic lifeforms with generally non-sexual methods of reproduction, the Transformer species has almost always been shown to include both male and female gender analogues, at least mentally if not physically.įemale Transformers were originally depicted as an anomaly, specifically called out as either a thought-to-be-extinct subgroup or simply never existing in the first place.
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