Since I saw grifters being stupid about it, let’s go into the conceptual history of female Transformers.
Ladybots have a very … clumsy origin, but not as clunky as stuff like the Matrix or 13 Primes.
Transformers fiction started with the Marvel Comics, and when asked by Bob Budiansky, the main creator of the general lore, if female robots were a thing at all, and Hasbro said no.
So Budiansky and later Furman just accepted that with the American Marvel comics not including female robots.
Later on, taking advantage of the humanoid Pretenders, Budiansky wrote this above part clarifying Transformers don’t do the same things we humans do in romantic terms. The comics much earlier clarified Cybertronians reproduce using the ancient Creation Matrix, with the cartoon using the equally ancient super computer Vector Sigma.
Cloudburst’s comment about TFs not having men or women wound up creating a misconception that lingers to this day, that Transformers collectively are a genderless species.
It’s not in my wheelhouse to understand the logistics of how that works, but it’s something I’ve never really agreed with due to the species still using masculine pronouns, which suggests, at the time, they’re an all male species. Some modern material like Aligned and IDW unhelpfully tried using this also, claiming the Transformers had no concept of gender as we define it and only began implementing it after contact with organic species. This also led to the controversial IDW Trans Arcee, and IDW’s flimsy retcons about how gender DID exist on Cybertron but biological (technological?) females went… extinct (?), with trans women filling in the gap, while bio-technological females naturally existed on the various colony planets. IDW was not shy on Cybertron being a planet of gay men in its later years, so take that as you will, same with the fandom misconception of Caminus being the “Amazon woman” planet due to it bringing in other females in IDW.
All that said however, female characters were tinkered with in the early concepts of the series. Budiansky had tinkered with females, with his original intent for Ratchet being a ladybot, as he was meant to be a reference to Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
This is where the cartoon comes in, as female robots were meant to be part of the story from the start. A recently unearthed script and pitch bible for the cartoon reveals the Autobots were meant to include a girl named Firecycle. Firecycle as a female medic and mutual love interest to Optimus Prime, with her shtick being she took her medic role so seriously she’d stop to repair Decepticons who were clearly faking it. She also valued life above all else, so she didn’t like to walk/drive on grass, fearing she’d hurt it. It should be noted Firecycle originates from the early story bible and pitch episode “A Robot’s Best Friend is his Dog”, repurposed from the Car & Cable pitch that had Muffy instead of Bumblebee.
This pitch also included the human cast from Car & Cable Matt Conroy, Eddie and Wendy Fairchild, and their dog Burt, hence the dog part. Burt was able to sniff out Decepticons hiding in Vehicle Mode, with this early pitch also leaning into the idea of Autobots and Decepticons being genetically distinct, as surmised by Matt.
This pitch also included a Decepticon called Whirlpool but we don’t know their gender, personality or vehicle mode. I like to think they were the first female Decepticon, but we won’t know for sure unless more of the early concept work is unearthed.
In the end, Firecycle never made it through, Hasbro presumably still not wanting girls in the boys’ clubhouse. It wasn’t until the cartoon staff put their foot down later on, citing girls liked Transformers also, including their daughters, that Hasbro eased off on it.
From there we got Arcee, Elita-1, Beta, Chromia, etc.
The inclusion of ladybots later in the series did come off as something of a retcon, as to explain why we hadn’t seen them before, Shockwave would muse on thinking they were extinct this whole time, with the show later clarifying female robots were around from the start.
Most future cartoons would follow the G1 cartoon’s lead, not really dwelling on where ladies came from, but including them anyway. There was still a predominant male over female robot slant, with most females being generics that persisted in stuff like the Unicron Trilogy.
Some much later American retcons for the anime and toy line would state that several Mini-Cons, Alexis’ partner Sureshock among them, were female, with Galaxy Force’s Override, AKA Nitro Convoy, being gender bent from male in Japan to female in America to boost female presence in the show.
What’s interesting is the female robots pushed were exclusively Autobots, as the G1 cartoon never included female DECEPTICONS. It’s never been explained yet why this was, but I partly suspect that Hasbro was only ok with girls so long as they were Autobots, and didn’t want little girls being naughty due to girls in Megatron’s employ.
Japanese manga would surprisingly include the first female Decepticons for the Victory manga.
Though they were depicted as civilians, and never actually fought the Autobots.
Still the ball was slowly rolling from here to depict Ladycons, with Beast Wars BlackArachnia in particular as the more prominent representative for a while, with her inspiring the Decepticon Airachnid. Strika from Beast Machines also contributed to increased female presence among the Decepticons.
Interestingly Japanese media tried to split the difference, where while we did have BlackArachnia and Seacon Scylla…
…most of the female presence was limited to the Navi computers, who are similar to the Beast Machines Diagnostic Drone in being little side kicks that help the Maximals and Predacons for their missions.
RiD01 had a similar concept in T-Ai, the friendly AI that was pals with Koji and helped Optimus lead the Autobots against the Predacons.
Slowly but surely though, steps were being taken to include female Transformers on top of the female rep in humans like Carly, Sari, Miko, Kelly and so forth. Animated and RiD15 saw a particular increase in female Autobots AND Decepticons both as major toys and fun background/in-show only characters like Lightyear, Glyph, Filch and Glowstrike among others.
And then Aligned and IDW happened.
The creation of Solus Prime on the surface somewhat muddled things, as she’s the defacto female robot of which all female Transformers are descended from in the same way animal types and Mini-Cons descend from Onyx and Micronus. On top of being The Fallen’s girlfriend who fell to his (unintentional) domestic violence, early concepts also state she helped birth the entire Cybertronian race, so yeah none of that helps. Some more recent stuff seemed to catch on this mild stereotype and focused more on her forager status, being the inventor and gadget gal of the group. That didn’t stop her in modern times from becoming an exclamation/swear word in RiD15 and Cyberverse in “Sweet Solus Prime!” Her biggest contribution was primarily her giant Fixit Felix hammer, which was a reoccurring relic in Prime wielded by both sides, with Megatron using it in a scheme to build his own weapon.
Solus was also credited with building the Star Saber and Apex Armor, though the later in Prime was said to be built by Decepticon scientists, conflicting with the Solus claim…
IDW didn’t help either, as mirroring Marvel, Arcee was the first female robot, born from a forced gender transition reformatting by Jhiaxus for skud and giggles just to see what would happen if gender as defined by organics, was suddenly introduced into the Transformer species. Arcee was understandably none too happy about this, her identity being violated and viscously hunting down Jhiaxus to exact revenge.
She would finally get her revenge thanks to Dead Universe shenanigans, getting to kill the undead scientist over and over again until she was satisfied.
Furman penned this story way before the modern social justice warrior/grifter stuff took root, with most agreeing Furman’s more sci-fi way to create females in a robotic species didn’t work, and mostly ignored it. It wasn’t until the modern hoopla we’ve been stuck in kicked in did IDW writers try to fix the problem. My issue with it is they wound up over correcting it, continually drawing attention to a matter most would rather have left ignored until the end of the original IDW run.
The retcon ultimately became that Arcee was an ancient Transformer from its prehistory, who was a mighty warrior alongside his brother Galvatron. At some point, Arcee wanted to be reformatted into a female body, and out of desperation sought out Jhiaxus intentionally rather than being captured at random. The earlier anger and rage was reinterpreted as Arcee instead being loopy from bad software used in her reconstruction.
Not helped either was a slip up confusing the matter if other ladybots existed on Cybertron pre-Arcee, with MTMTE, TAAO, & OP explaining them as trans ladybots also, and that Cybertron’s females either way left the planet or became extinct. Whatever the case, the planet became populated by male robots who were unfamiliar with females, creating a Vandread situation when Ladybots were shown to still exist on colony planets I don’t think was at all intentional…
Simply put it was a mess.
A mess IDW and later Skybound sought not to repeat by just having Ladybots of all makes and models exist from the start, no mental gymnastics needed.
It’s this heavy insistence though on trying to make trans woman rep, good intentioned but hopelessly flawed, that got grifters and some veteran fans cheesed off. On top of the bizarre situation with Arcee, the main trans rep besides her were Anode and Lug, new characters for MTMTE/LL who were met with revulsion because most readers found them incredibly annoying (though some were mad at them for being trans also, let’s not dance around that). It doesn’t help at the height of the feminism stuff in the mid 2010’s saw news outlets claim female Transformers were being introduced into the franchise by IDW, a horrible misunderstanding, and shows that most weren’t really aware of Arcee, Elita, Firestar, Blackarachnia, Thunderblast, Airrazor, and more from older material…
Another frowned upon thing from this era that persisted to EarthSpark was the habit of gender bending legacy bots into females, with Skywarp, Frenzy, Ravage, Swoop, and Jazz as particular standouts, alongside Nova Storm (a generic in the scheme of things but still noteworthy). There was also a peculiar push from modern cartoon writers to make Thundercracker a girl, but Hasbro put their foot down on him specifically. This is partly why Nova Storm occupies the modern Jet trio, to make up for the lack of a lady Thundercracker. It’s this modern flippant gender swapping that annoys people, as it comes off as an artificial attempt to boost female robots in a time when we have plenty more preexisting ladies to choose from. (And I say that aware of the era Override came from.) Clearly it doesn’t matter unless it’s a popular male character turned female, which is why I’m surprised Hot Rod, Grimlock or Soundwave haven’t gotten gender bent yet. It’s also why I side eye Mae Catt’s sole lament on ES being unable to bring back trans Arcee, the one thing everyone just wants to escape from… Read the room, Mae. There was room for a trans robot, but Arcee wasn’t it.
Still, despite the very bumpy ride getting there, female Transformers did start becoming more common place, with the Autobots typically having Arcee, Windblade or Elita-1 as the token chick of the team, while the Decepticons were a toss up. As of typing, they still haven’t settled on a defacto female Decepticon, despite experimenting with Airachnid, Nightbird, and Shadow Striker in those roles.
Still let it be known the next time a grifter starts trouble, female Transformers were supposed to exist from the start, it just took them a little longer to drive by was all.
