User:Locoman/Sandbox/FemaleTF

Although the Transformers are robotic lifeforms with generally non-sexual methods of reproduction, their species includes both male and female gender analogues, at least mentally if not physically. Female Transformers were historically relegated to the sidelines of most Transformers stories, but with the evolution of the Transformers brand, and changing real-life attitudes, recent years have seen a sharp increase in their numbers, narrative prominence, and overall fairness of reputation. Though early stories often treated their mere existence as something anomalous and "outside" of traditional Cybertronian norms, most modern stories treat female Transformers as a normal part of the Cybertronian race.

There's still a long way to go, since they are still pretty dang rare 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. 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.

A list of female Transformers from all continuities is available.

Conceptual history

Well, I remember bringing up that question early on with Hasbro, "are any of these female?" And then I think Hasbro's attitude was, 'this is a boy toy. We don't wanna have, you know, girl robots.' So, I said, "OK, just want to clarify that."Bob Budiansky, Rusting Carcass interview

On the other hand, maybe a medic who enjoyed getting skunked on tainted 40-weight oil wasn't the best example, either...

Like most toy brands in the eighties, Hasbro originally advertised its brands along gendered lines: "boy's toys" versus "girl's toys". As Hasbro intended Transformers to be a boy-skewing brand, they had no plans to introduce or sell toys of female characters. Indeed, when Marvel Comics brought on Bob Budiansky to help develop the Transformers story beyond the toys, he learned that Hasbro had no intentions of introducing any female characters—despite this, some of Budianksy's earliest handwritten notes use female pronouns for the character who would become Ratchet, describing "her" as the Autobot's "go-to gal" for repairs. (As a result of this, Budiansky devised the Creation Matrix as an asexual means of procreation, which in turn, gave him a handy "out" when the comic needed to introduce new toys.)

At any rate, the first year or so of the Transformers franchise continued this way, focusing exclusively on male robots. However, as the franchise grew in popularity, it attracted a following of girls as well. When the franchise grew popular enough for Hasbro to commission an animated film based on the television show, producer Ron Friedman fought to introduce a female character, basing his argument on his own daughter's fondness for the television show and banking on the argument that there were other little girls who wanted to see Transformers like them on the screen. Though Hasbro and Sunbow were reportedly very resistant to his idea, Friemdan won, and his success led to the creation of Arcee. This debate evidently happened early enough that the season two episode "The Search for Alpha Trion", written during the development of the movie, introduced another female character, Elita One, and her personal team of Female Autobots—although beyond an aborted retool of Chromedome for Arcee, none of these characters were ever meant to appear in the concurrent toyline. The Marvel comic, on the other hand, did not introduce any female Transformers during its US run; the the UK comics explained Arcee's existence in a short story which explained that Prime created her to appease an angry mob of human feminists.

By the time of Beast Wars in the mid-1990s, writers Bob Forward and Larry DiTillio deliberately sought more female representation in their show. They first introduced Blackarachnia as a major character early in the series, and had enough leverage over Kenner's marketing team that they were able to get them to change Airazor's gender from male to female before the toy hit stores. Japan lagged behind the curve; the Car Robots cartoon that was imported to become Robots in Disguise only featured the sentient computer program T-AI by way of female representation, and the subsequent Unicron Trilogy only featured a smattering of significant girl characters that included Sureshock, Energon, and Thunderblast, to the point where Cartoon Network deliberately changed the male Nitro Convoy into the female Override when dubbing the Cybertron cartoon.

One early draft of the first live-action Transformers film featured Arcee as one of the five Autobots who would've arrived on Earth alongside Optimus Prime. However, the script writers felt they would have had to explain why the Transformers possessed gender, and as a result she was cut from the film and replaced with Ironhide (though she played a significant role in various ancillary movie comics). She, Chromia, and Elita-One all made the leap to the big screen in 2009's Revenge of the Fallen. The development of the Aligned continuity family in 2010 led to the introduction of Solus Prime, the first (and only) female member of the thirteen original Transformers.

In 2013, Hasbro announced the "Fan Built Bot" contest, an online poll where fans would develop an all-new character that would recieve a toy in the Generations toyline. After several rounds of polling, it was decided that the new character would be a red female jet named Windblade. Windblade made her official debut in IDW Publishing's "Dark Cybertron" crossover maxiseries, then received two volumes of her own self-titled miniseries written by Mairghread Scott. Combined with various developments in the real-world pop culture landscape that have led to an increased push for diversity and representation, Hasbro has elevated Windblade to the status of a "headline character" for the Transformers franchise as a whole, and the character now frequently shares marquee space with standbys like Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and sometimes even Arcee herself! In the years since, many different writers have introduced original female characters which have become popular characters in their own right, such as Nautica, Aileron, and Gauge. Toys with no pronouns or no bios attached to them altogether have often been used to add more gender diversity; mediums such as Fun Publications and Cyberverse have re-imagined preexisting male characters with new genders.

All told, it's a pretty impressive turnaround for a company who once refused to entertain the mere notion of girl Transformers.

Fiction

Generation 1 continuity family

Cartoon continuities

The Transformers cartoon

"Good morning, Angels."

The Quintessons, creators of the Transformer race, manufactured and enslaved both "male" and "female" robots when the cruel aliens controlled Cybertron. One female robot named Beta worked alongside A-3 during the rebellion that saw the Quintesson ousted from Cybertron. Forever Is a Long Time Coming In the years before Megatron's Decepticon uprising, the young robot Ariel was in a romantic relationship with Orion Pax; Alpha Trion then rebuilt the two into Elita One and Optimus Prime when they were injured in the Decepticon attack that heralded the beginning of the Great War. War Dawn

By the present day, Shockwave expressed surprise when he encountered Elita One and her team of "Female Autobots", noting that he thought that they were extinct. From dialogue alone it's unclear if he is referring to this specific group of Autobots in particular, or the entire concept of female Autobots in general; either way, more girl characters showing up in the movie and season three suggests that whatever information Shockwave had was probably not reliable. The Search for Alpha Trion Most notably, the Autobot Arcee became a prominent Autobot after the Unicron War; her adventures included having her consciousness downloaded into a synthoid body, Only Human and later becoming a Headmaster. The Rebirth, Part 2

No female Transformers were shown to join the Decepticons, although when Megatron briefly welcomed the human-built automaton Nightbird into the Decepticon ranks, nobody seemed particularly bothered by her existence. Enter the Nightbird

Other Transformer-like mechanical species such as the Junkions and Lithones possessed both "males" and "females", The Transformers: The Movie most prominently the Junkion Nancy. The Big Broadcast of 2006

Japanese cartoon continuity

Elita didn't expect the Orthia auditions to have this big a turnout.

Although The Transformers: The Movie and seasons three and four of the American cartoon introduced Arcee as a capable equal to the cast of male characters, the Japanese-exclusive The Headmasters cartoon made the unfortunate decision to depict her as, essentially, the Autobot's secretary, spending most of her time at a computer screen or passing out memos to the main cast of characters. The Headmasters

The Super-God Masterforce cartoon introduced the human woman Minerva, whose Transtector eventually evolved into a separate, fully-sentient being; A Battle... and Then... while the powerful Decepticon Overlord was a composite entity made up of Mega and her husband Giga, although the final personality identified as male. Super-God Masterforce

Both male and female Micromasters inhabited the planet Micro, including Holi's girlfriend Clipper. Unite! Liokaiser

Operation Combination introduced a total of 24 Micromasters, none of which got a bio. Ten years later, the Micromasters Windy and Discharge were established as female in the pages of Micromaster. Micromaster

The Tigatron of the Legends World once dreamt about every female Autobot and Decepticon in the multiverse battling over him. LG11 Chromia

Victory manga

The Victory manga introduced the first female Dcepticons in the franchise, depicting them as part of a "civilian" population of Decepticons who lived atop the Planet-Destroying Fortress, and included Deathsaurus's wife Esmeral and Leozack's sister Lyzack.

Wings Universe

The Autobot Side Burn enjoyed picking up women at bars by spinning grandiose tales of dubious veracity. Battle Lines, Part 1

Marvel Comics continuity

The very first issue of Marvel's continuity was actually the first piece of media to ever introduce a female Cybertronian: Aunty, the onboard computer of the Ark; a later appearance in the UK story "Raiders of the Last Ark" gave her a feminine holographic face. Beyond that, however, no actual female Transformers are ever seen or referred to in the US run of the Marvel comics, although the letters page for issue #53 namedropped Arcee in response to a question about female Transformers. This letters page explained that, while Transformers had no concept of gender, the majority possessed "characteristics that are commonly associated with males" and used male pronouns, while a smaller percentage used female pronouns for the same reason. Ironically enough, the main story in issue #53 depicted a scene in which the First One of Femax pressured Cloudburst into a relationship, which he unsuccessfully tried to escape by explaining that his society had "no men, no women, no mates". (At the same time that this goes down, however, Landmine is shown entertaining a harem of beautiful women, so we leave you to draw your own conclusions.) Recipe for Disaster!

You can't shoot Squeezeplay just because he's a bloke.

Arcee did appear in Marvel's UK stories, but received an alternate origin only after she'd appeared in UK's post-film future stories. As detailed in "Prime's Rib!", she was intentionally created by the Autobots in 1995 to be the sole female Transformer in an attempt to placate human feminists. In "Ladies' Night" and "Prime's Rib", the Autobots are depicted as entirely ignorant about human gender relations and sterotypes; Ladies' Night Prime's Rib! while in "Space Pirates!", Rodimus Prime was ambushed by wanting to help Arcee first. Space Pirates!

The UK letter pages mentioned another two females: Decepticon Powermaster Clio and presumed Autobot Karmen, who is Blaster's sister. Provided they are real and Blaster didn't just make them up, they're unlikely to have been built à la Arcee (unless the 'Cons really care about gender representation) and could be taken as falling under that 'characteristics' approach. Or the 'Blaster' staffer didn't care. Two continuations of Marvel would introduce female Transformers: BotCon's Classics fiction introduced Elita One in "Games of Deception" in a manner similar to UK Arcee Games of Deception along with an inexplicable mention of Hun-Grrr's mother, At Fight's End and IDW's Regeneration One featured Botanica as the first member of a new generation of Cybertronian life. The War to End All Wars, Part 5

Beast Era

By the time that the Beast Wars cartoon hit the airwaves in the mid 1990s, the writers didn't feel the need to explain the existence of female Transformers; by and large, characters treated them as a normal part of Cybertronian civilization. Showrunners Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward actively pushed for more gender representation among the cast and even convinced Kenner to advertise their upcoming Airazor with female pronouns in anticipation of her debut on the Beast Wars television show. Indeed, one unproduced episode would have even seen the two briefly join forces. The one-off character Transmutate presents a borderline case—though the character recieves no pronouns in their eponymous episode, the episode's script mentions that Transmutate sports "a face that vaguely indicates it is female", so make of that what you will.

Compared to its predecessors, Beast Wars incorporated quite a lot of romance; over the course of the show's run Airazor and Blackarachnia fell in love with Tigatron and Silverbolt respectively. Other Visits (Part 1) The Agenda (Part III) In particular, Silverbolt's chivalrous moral code meant that he refused to fight Blackarachnia, Tangled Web although this was not a belief that other Maximals seemed to share. The Agenda (Part 2) Predacons like Quickstrike and Tarantulas found this behaviour to be quite inscrutable, Tangled Web although Megatron once wondered if Tarantulas had "ulterior motives" for providing Blackarachnia with her spider beast mode. Double Jeopardy

Similar innuendos abound throughout the series: Cheetor crushes on Blackarachnia, Crossing the Rubicon who in turn plays on his teenage lust by manipulating him for information. Feral Scream Part 2 At one point, Rattrap enthuses about the Cybertronian equivalent of a topless bar, though any details are tastefully left to the imagination. The Agenda (Part 1)

Early into the development of the Beast Machines cartoon, story editor Bob Skir wanted the main character Nightscream to be female, likening her to Newt from the movie Aliens. When the powers that be said "no", Nightscream wound up becoming John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgment Day instead. Blackarachnia returned as a major character, and the cartoon's second season introduced two new female characters—heroic Maximal Botanica and the villainous Vehicon General Strika.

The Japanese-exclusive Beast Wars II series featured Scylla, impetus for a big ridiculous love triangle in both the anime and manga continuities; she spent most of her time madly pursuing the aloof Scuba, dismissive and oblivious to the romantic advances of the Maximal Bighorn. Showdown in the Sea The non-Transformer female robot Artemis harbors a crush on both Scuba (poor guy) and Starscream. Although the followup Beast Wars Neo franchise did not feature any female characters, one manga chapter did feature Stampy remembering his mother. Mortal Combat! Twenty Thousand Meters in the Sky The exact implications of this statement would not go explored until 2015, when TransTech fiction confirmed that she and her husband used their "integrated organic parts" to, um, make Stampy. Andromeda - Axiom Nexus News, 2015/05/10

In 2021, IDW Publishing's rebooted Beast Wars comic introduced the original female characters Nyx and Skold as crew members aboard the Axalon and Darksyde, respectively—part of this decision was borne out of author Erik Burnham's desire to balance out the very guy-heavy cast of the original cartoon.

Dreamwave Generation One continuity

Although Transformers are an inherently non-gendered race, the species nevertheless counts a number of female Transformers among its number. Transformers: The Ultimate Guide The Cybertronians were unaware that at least some of these female Transformers, such as Arcee, were actually Quintesson sleeper agents, inserted into Cybertronian society to spy on the species. Lost and Found In turn, the Quintessons maintained direct "extraction squads" that included Elita One and her Female Autobots. Generation 1 #11 As Dreamwave Productions ceased operations before their story arc could conclude, the origins of these female Transformers and the true nature of their connection—if any—to the rest of the Cybertronian species remains unclear.

2005 IDW continuity

what do 'he' and 'she' pronouns connote in a TF context? Do they connote *exactly* the same things as they do in a human context? I don't know. It hasn't been properly explored yet. All that said, let's assume that a Transformer who adopts a particular personal pronoun is doing so for the same reasons that a human would.James Roberts on TwitLonger

Simon Furman has historically not been a fan of female Transformers, and as the original architect of the early 2005 IDW continuity he stated that he would not use them unless he came up with a reason that made logical sense. He did not rule out this entirely; he pointed out, for instance, that he had found justification to use the Pretender gimmick in the Stormbringer miniseries. The early stories thus established that Cybertronians were functionally "genderless", but also did not take organic gender into account when selecting holomatter disguises. Bumblebee's holomatter avatar, for instance, took the form of an attractive woman based on Lindsay Lohan; Infiltration #3 much later, Ultra Magnus based his on his friend Verity Carlo—the only time anyone questioned this was when Magnus's companions wondered why the legendarily-uptight cop chose the freewheeling Verity as a template. Cybertronian Homesick Blues

The subject of Transformer gender first came to the fore in 2008's "Spotlight: Arcee". It introduced the eponymous character as the product of Jhiaxus's mad science, a Frankensteinian attempt to introduce gender into the species by tampering with the fundamental CNA of a test subject. As a result of his experiment, male Transformers would unconsciously refer to Arcee with female pronouns even if they had never met her. The traumatic experiment left Arcee disoriented and vengeful, driven to kill her "creator" by any means necessary. Spotlight: Arcee This story did not sit well with quite a few people, who, among other things, criticized the comic's stereotypes and its depictions of femininity and gender presentation as something aberrant.

When James Roberts and John Barber took the reins of the universe in early 2012, they repeatedly considered adding more female Transformers into the universe as early as "The Death of Optimus Prime", which would have seen feminine Transformers among the waves of NAIL refugees. This didn't come to pass, however, and the continuity's next brush with gender issues wouldn't be until 2014, when Hasbro introduced "Fan-Built Bot" Windblade and IDW announced she'd receive a tie-in IDW comic. Mairghread Scott made it clear that Windblade's femininity would not be accidental, nor would it be the product of a sinister experiment. (This led to a brief conflict as Furman initially read this as a personal attack on his work.) Windblade and her compatriots Chromia and Nautica first appeared in the Dark Cybertron crossover. Burning Bright: Dark Cybertron Chapter 8 Originally, the pair were planned to look less feminine, so that readers "wouldn't have clocked" they were female until their dialogue, but this plan was scrapped because IDW wanted to immediately establish their gender. Issue #31 of More than Meets the Eye initially described Nautica as having an "estriol-positive" spark-type, (no doubt based off the female hormone of the same name) Twenty Plus One but Roberts opted to change this to "ferrum-positive" in the trade paperback, after deciding it was unnecessary and "potentially offensive" to imply that female and male bots were fundamentally different.

IDW's Windblade comic explained that Windblade and her compatriots hailed from the lost colony of Caminus. Originally, the idea was that the Transformers in this isolated culture had simply evolved from their ancestors to include a concept of gender. A 'Bot and Her City Barber and Scott both worked together on developing Caminus' background to avoid falling into the opposite stereotype of a woman-only planet, and emphasized that on Caminus Transformers of both genders peacefully coexisted. Bit by bit, however, Robots in Disguise and The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye suggested the opposite: ancient Cybertron did once possess a population of female Transformers, and colonies like Caminus and Prion supported remnant populations long after they'd somehow disappeared from the homeworld. The Permanent Revolution Issue #37 of Robots in Disguise revealed-slash-retconned that Jhiaxus had been seeking to restore this lost element of Cybertronian civilization, ONoffON and the finale of the Combiner Wars comic confirmed that female Transformers remained alive and well on the other colonies. All That Remains Finally, the Combiner Wars coda comic introduced the second fan-built Transformer: the all-female combiner Victorion and her six components. An Uneventful Night

DAWW

By this point, most of the mystique around female Transformers had vanished. With the existence of several colony planets providing an easy out, characters like Moonracer and Elita One, previously non-G1 characters like Override and Airazor, original characters like Aileron and Velocity, and even previously male characters like Slide all played major roles from 2015 on, all the way up until the very end of the continuity in 2018.

Even before Spotlight: Arcee, artists had previously thrown in another of female cameos in background crowd scenes—even in instances where these female Transformers couldn't have existed on Cybertron. 2007's Megatron Origin featured a very high number of these cameos, including Crasher, Elita One, Chromia, and various generics. James Roberts had teased the possibility of transgender Transformers for some years, and finally used the concept to, in part, explain these cameos. Occasionally, Cybertronians who ventured off-world, such as the Primal Vanguard, encountered gendered aliens and chose to adopt female pronouns and body-types. From this revelation, we got Anode and her partner Lug—the first two definitively, canonically, transgender Transformer characters. An Axe to Break the Ice Around the same time, John Barber delved deeper into Arcee's original backstory and dropped hints that Arcee had, at least to some extent, consented to Jhiaxus's gender experiments. Future Glories Lost The very last issue set in this continuity finally brought things full circle; Arcee explained that she too had been transgender and had deliberately sought out Jhiaxus—not seeing the mad scientist for what he was—to help her transition. Post

2019 IDW continuity

Shouldn't she be in the OCEAN, then?

As a result of changing attitudes in both the Transformers fandom and the real-world pop culture landscape, the 2019 comic reboot has largely done away with the convoluted retcons and leaps of logic necessary to increase inclusion of female Transformers in the later years of its predecessor, choosing to instead depict female Cybertronians of all shapes and sizes as an accepted, normal part of Cybertronian civilization.

Female Cybertronians constitute a large percentage of this continuity's ensemble cast. Both Windblade and Chromia return as major characters, and new introductions to the mythos include Termagax, Leviathan, Codexa, Accelerator, Gauge, and Lodestar, the first female Titan The main ongoing has featured an astonishingly high number of female characters plucked from other parts of the mythos—these range from notable faces like Slipstream, Shadow Striker, or Strongarm, all the way down to obscure faces like Trickdiamond, Vibes, Lightbright, or Andromeda.

Robots in Disguise continuity family

2001 Robots in Disguise cartoon

Other than the partially-qualifying computer program T-AI, no female Transformers appear on-screen in the Robots in Disguise cartoon. However, dialogue from Side Burn seemingly implies their existence; at one point, he claimed that a red sports car had once broken his heart, and was only tripped up by lying that this event had taken place on Earth. Sideburn's Obsession

Ask Vector Prime

In one universe, Optimus Prime is female, and by extension so is her evil clone, Scourge. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/08/18 In another reality, Nightcruz was an accomplished member of the Elite Guard. Ask Vector Prime, 2015/09/22

Unicron Trilogy

Female characters exist throughout the Unicron Trilogy in varying capacities. Of the early Armada cast, the Mini-Con Sureshock was the show's only recurring female Transformer... not only did she not speak intelligible English, but the rushed overseas dub also gave her male pronouns on multiple occasion.

Though many female characters appeared in background roles, the Unicron Trilogy is notable for its depictions of female characters in leadership positions, which hadn't really been done before at the time: Energon introduced Arcee as the leader of the entire Omnicon race; the original Japanese dub of the television show explained that the power of energon had "evolved" one Omnicon into a feminine form to motivate and encourage the other members of her faction, but this origin story didn't really make it into the mangled English dub. The Cybertron cartoon introduced Override as the leader of the planet Velocitron. In the original Japanese cartoon, Override (aka "Nitro Convoy") was conceived as a young male character, but Cartoon Network felt it needed a greater female presence in the main cast.

Other notable female characters from this era include the flirtatious Thunderblast from Cybertron, Falcia and Twirl in the Linkage comics, and Airazor from Dreamwave's Armada series.

Live-action film series

Comic artists cry when they see this model sheet.

Arcee was originally going to be featured as part of the cast of the Transformers film, but was cut early on in the movie's development. The script writers felt they would need to explain the presence of a female in an entirely robotic race, and there was not enough time in the film to do so. Arcee was replaced in the movie by Ironhide. Despite this, Arcee and Elita-One both recieved toys and made prominent appearances in both IDW Publishing's extended movie-based universe and Titan Magazine's alternate reality saga. On the Decepticon side of things, Fracture, a homage to the GoBots character Crasher, appeared in the toyline and comics.

Arcee later made the leap to the big screen in 2009's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which depicted her as a strange tripartite being who controlled three simultaneous bodies, alongside the Decepticon Pretender code-named "Alice". Despite earlier predictions, the film did not feel the need to explain the nature of Transformer gender, though IDW's tie-in comics did reveal that Arcee's three "bodies"—Arcee, Elita-1, and Chromia were once independent siblings who had been forcibly combined together through Decepticon experimentation.

After Titan's first volume, the female characters were seen less and less; when a reader asked why in #4 of the third volume, editor Rona Simpson broke character in the letters page and admitted: "This is something we would love to change, but for the moment, the 'mech' figures are more popular and our hands are tied." The third and fourth films didn't feature any female Cybertronians, but The Last Knight introduced the mysterious Quintessa as the film's central antagonist.

The prequel film Bumblebee features a cameo appearance by a single-bodied Arcee in the first scenes of the movie, and introduces the cunning Shatter as the film's primary antagonist.

Animated continuity family

Early on in the production of Transformers Animated , Ratchet's role as the Autobot medical officer was originally filled by a character named Red Alert, who was originally designed as a female, but then turned male. Red Alert later appeared in the season three premiere as female in homage to the original concept for the character. Female Transformers were present from the very beginning of the cartoon, starting with Blackarachnia and Arcee. When Bulkhead and Bumblebee encountered Blackarachnia, they were confused by her technorganic nature, though Sari Sumdac joked "Duh, she's a girl" as a nod to the rarity of female Transformers. Along Came a Spider

The third season Animated introduced a large number of other female Transformers; these included a female clone of Starscream, the Decepticon general Strika, and a number of civilian Autobots like Lightbright and Flareup. The two AllSpark Almanacs ran with the idea, and invented bios for a number of female characters like Rosanna and Botanica.

Because Sari was originally a Cybertronian protoform, she could be considered a female technorganic Transformer, although her origins were not revealed until the third season.

Shattered Glass

While in most universes the number of females on the side of good is significantly larger than the number on the side of evil, this universe has more evil ladies as a result of its status as a mirror universe. The first two introduced were Arcee and Crasher—an (evil) Autobot and a (good) Decepticon respectively—but since then the balance has tilted by featuring evil versions of Elita-One, Windblade, Strongarm, and Sureshock.

The Autobot Cliffjumper, who hailed from the Marvel Comics-derived Classics universe, found Crasher's shape unusual and noted that "they'd only just started making bots like [her]" in his native dimension. However, none of the inhabitants of this backwards reality found their existence notable. Eye in the Sky

Aligned continuity family

The Cybertronians of this universe are technically asexual and agender, but divide themselves into two distinct categories based on how their brains process and compartmentalize information. One-thirteenth of the Cybertronian species possess a unique structure that corresponds to Solus Prime, whose Creation Lathe required a capacity for wide-ranging parallel thought-processing. In ancient times, all Cybertronians utilized a single pronoun; after making contact with gendered alien races, they incorporated male and female pronouns into their culture to demonstrate that they recognized differences among themselves. The Covenant of Primus In the modern day, this demographic use female pronouns and are considered to be descendants of Solus Prime.

Despite this, a surprisingly high number of female characters appeared throughout the "Aligned" continuity over the course of its ten-year run. The original Prime cartoon gave Arcee a top billing, and introduced the entirely new Airachnid as a threat. Ancillary sources like The Covenant of Primus and IDW's Prime comics reimagined pre-existing female characters like Chromia and introduced new characters like Cogwheel and Ser-Ket. 2012's Transformers Online introduced numerous female Transformers for both factions. Yes, the Chinese MMO that lasted about a year, in the continuity family where female Transformers are canonically rare, introduced more female characters than any single other source in years. Other than getting some minor details and anglicised names in Ask Vector Prime, they've yet to be used by anyone else.

The Japanese-exclusive Arms Micron Theater segments introduced the Arms Microns Arc, Arcee Blade, and Ida, and the Cybertron Satellite promotion c reated Akiba Prime as one of the many Town Commanders.

The 2015 Robots in Disguise cartoon was notable for creating Strongarm, a rookie Autobot who found her way into IDW's Generation 1-inspired comic, and featured a number of female villains like Filch, Zizza, Glowstrike, Scatterspike, Nightra, Cyberwarp, and Skyjack.

Ask Vector Prime

In some universes, Cybertronians have no concept of gender; in others, gender analogs do not correspond to human characteristics, and in still others some Cybertronians do not conform to a binary male/female state. Andromeda - Axiom Nexus News, 2015/05/14

Cy-Kill considered female Cybertronians to be little more than "window dressing" considering what a big deal some people made of them as opposed to female GoBots who were an equal, and essential, part of Cy-Kill's various evil plans. Renegade Rhetoric (2), 12 January 2016

Cyberverse

The Cyberverse cartoon took significant cues from recent cartoons and comics by including a number of significant female characters off the bat, including Windblade and Slipstream. Uniquely, the show's writers changed the genders of several traditionally-male characters; these included Cosmos Alien Hunt! With Meteorfire And Cosmos and Skywarp. Battle For Cybertron II Writer Mae Catt expressed a desire to do more with this idea by extending it to other characters like the Jazz. , Introducing many more characters, this series boasts the highest number of female characters in a Transformers television show.

In a rather unique addition to the franchise, the Seeker Acid Storm went back and forth between using the male and female Seeker bodies; though this most likely began as a simple animation error, Mae Catt used it as an opportunity to canonize the first ever gender-fluid Transformers character.

BotBots

The Transformers: BotBots franchise is notable for introducing the largest amount of original female characters in any single Transformers line—as of Series 5, released barely a year and a quarter after the line's debut, 110 out of 332 characters are female, almost exactly one-third of the cast... and there's several characters who don't have published bios yet, or their bios lack gendered pronouns altogether, so who knows? Of course, BotBots has a few safeguards against the above-mentioned "they don't sell": the Bots mostly have very gender-neutral designs, and the bios are (mostly) published online rather than on the packaging.