Transformers Are Gendered (and I don't mean male and female) copyright 2014 by Dave Van Domelen ============================================================================== DISCLAIMER: Yes, I know the real reason almost all Cybertronians read as male is that it's a toy line aimed at boys and makes its money by reinforcing gender stereotypes, the canon is often written by people with pretty retrograde views of gender roles, etc. But stepping inside the fiction, there's still room to theorize, which I will now do. ============================================================================== Outside of a few weird edge cases (mostly in Japanese continuities) and a whole lot of fanfics, Transformers do not reproduce sexually, so they don't have sexes. But they do have genders...and I'm not talking about male and female, either. Before I go further, though, I need to clarify some use of language. Gender is a set of societal expectations that are usually based on the physically expressed sex. But even in an obviously sexual species like humanity, there are societies with gender roles not automatically tied to what plumbing you were born with, some with three distinct genders, etc. So saying "male sex == male gender" isn't even a valid statement for all humans, let alone robotic lifeforms from a distant star system. So, how do I propose to define gender without specifically coding it to human sexes? Well, gender roles are much like caste roles, only the two ideas are separate among humans because we have both parents and different body plans. A gender role is assigned based on the body plan you're born with (usually), and a caste is assigned based on your parentage. But in a race with no lineage to point at (everyone's a child of Vector Sigma or the Quintessons or the Well of All Sparks...whatever the continuity's plot device is), the only distinction of birth is what sort of body you have. (Aside: the IDW continuity does have two separate lineages based on distinct means of creation, and those do function as true castes.) Therefore, caste-like differences arising from the nature of a Cybertronian's body would be Cybertronian genders. To wit, the most common genders of Cybertronians are military and civilian. If you were built for war, you're of the military gender. If you were built for peace (or in the Season 3 G1 view, a Quintesson consumer product), you're of the civilian gender. You could argue that a "Function" entry in a character's bio card is actually their gender, giving Cybertronians scores of distinct genders, with ones like "Warrior" being more common than ones like "Diversionary Tactician". However, sometimes a character will change function from season to season, or even from paint job to paint job (i.e. "Scout" to "Stealth Warrior"), which suggests that Function is too flexible to be considered a gender. Therefore, I'm going to stick with the mostly-binary military/ civilian division, while admitting that within each gender there exists a spectrum of specific roles, like a police officer who is a civilian with a strong military bent. Obviously, this maps only loosely onto human gender roles, and leads to almost everyone using male pronouns. Only a few societies throughout history have split military and civilian apart so thoroughly along gender lines... all-male militaries are common, but having all of the males required to join the military is rare. But hey, these are alien robots, they don't have to use gender roles that map well onto human norms. What about human-style female Cybertronians, who exist in some continuities and not others, and would use female pronouns? The lack of sex means that Cybertronians either totally lack, or are short on, a number of traits that human societies tend to assign to the female role. So it makes sense that Cybertronians who seem female to us would be rare as a general principle, even if the actual execution in the canon is questionable. I would suggest that in continuities where they haven't definitively answered the "why are there girls?" question, femininity is simply a secondary or even tertiary trait tied to gender but not defining it. In other words, a female scientist would be of the civilian gender, not the female gender. Their femininity is probably more core to their being than their specific field of study, but rebuilding to become a proper soldier would be more traumatic and extensive than rebuilding to become a male scientist. Gender also doesn't seem to be tied to any particular functionality, so there's no real incentive to change whatever aspects make a Cybertronian female when changing other gender elements: Ariel became a soldier as Elita-1 without giving up her female characteristics, for instance. And whatever the heck defined Strika as female certainly didn't depend on her body! It's even possible that femininity is purely volitional, not tied to Cybertronian social norms in any significant way, no more important a choice than the color of one's paint job...but no less important. After all, Optimus Prime gets new bodies all the time, but keeps the red and blue. The extreme of this position can be seen in the parodic Insecticomics, in which Armada Thrust simply decides one day that she's female, primarily to mess with people who were taking gender too seriously. Does this mean the great war of Autobot vs. Decepticon is just one big battle of the genders? Not quite. While most Decepticons are military gender and most Autobots are civilian gender (and very uncomfortable with being forced into military gender roles), each side has members of both genders. Regardless of his background, Grimlock was definitely built to fight in every continuity where he exists. Swindle was probably civilian by creation, a negotiator type who got involved with a bunch of soldiers. One could even argue that G1 Starscream was a civilian-build explorer at first, but his ambitions led him to reformat himself as a soldier. Or maybe I'm just amused by the idea that Alpha Trion performed gender reassignment surgery on Orion Pax to make him into Optimus Prime. =============================================================================== Addendum: While not really the point of the essay, it's been brought up in response and bears briefly addressing: the reason why we perceive Cybertronians as being predominantly male. As mentioned above, Cybertronians are short on the characteristics we use to define female roles. We see them as mostly male because we try to fit them into our gender roles (rather than understanding their gender roles), and our gender roles are a really bad fit for an asexual species. In other words, we project our sexism onto them.