Why Windblade?: A Brief History of Gender in Transformers

Windblade- the Fan Built Bot.

With the recent release of Windblade- the first original female character in a long while for the brand- I feel now might be a good time for a discussion- a brief history of gender in the Transformers. Windblade is a character created through polls, by committee of fans through a promotion called the 'Fan Built Bot'. They voted on everything- down to gender. This might to a casual reader seem strange- they're robots, after all, why do they have genders? And for a couple years of the Generation 1 cartoon and comic in the 80's, this was true. The cartoon lacked explication- but the comic established a lore in which the Transformers were agender, but used male pronouns for convenience- generally accepted as a translation convention since none of the characters spoke English natively.

Season two of the cartoon, however, challenged this presumption by creating a group of female Transformers active on Cybertron in the backstory of Optimus Prime, Shockwave comments in this episode he thought female Autobots were extinct- and since the episode itself was a flashback, it doesn't disrupt the cartoon's continuity at all. However, at this point, the comic had clearly established itself as separate- and it kept its agender lore in place. But the 1985 movie kicking off season 3 introduced a female main character to the cast of the cartoon- pink and white, classically beautiful  Arcee. Pressed with Arcee by corporate mandate, Simon Furman wrote the story Prime's Rib- taking place in the future time frame before the film as a satire. In the far-flung year of 1995, Feminists unwilling to understand the Transformers' nature stir against the Autobots, calling them sexist due to their lack of females. Optimus Prime built Arcee to appease them- and they are not amused with her design, believing her a 'token effort' that is 'degrading to women.' The story was a one-off for the comic, Arcee never appeared in the comics afterwards- though she remained through the run of Generation 1.

Continuities since have generally stuck with depictions of Arcee and or the others of the flashback characters as the only notable females in permutations of the normal setting- the exception to this rule being one migrant from the Beast Wars continuities- Blackarachnia, the femme fatale of the Beast Wars cartoon. However, as the brand gained female fans in the internet age, this became an issue- fans took offense and there was a backlash. This was made no better when Simon Furman, working on the new IDW Generation 1 comic, made female Transformers the result of a mad scientist tampering with the genome to see what would happen.

And this, in short, brings us to where Windblade enters the Transformers' story. She was part of a stranded colony of Transformers- who naturally evolved gender over time. Like many elements of Transformers biology, this seems to raise further questions, but for the sake of narrative is easiest to simply take at face value. To this day there is a large disparity- 65 females to 704 males in thirty years of Transformers fiction. This is easily explained by demographic- but a ten-to-one ratio is not a good model for kids of any gender. Windblade was a fans' choice- and maybe Hasbro should look to why the choice was made.