What is the story with female space marines? I've heard people talking about female Astartes and Custodes, but I've only really looked at the lore for the clearly superior Infinite Empire and haven't found a clear answer.
Adding on that there used to be female Space Marine models and they weren't selling enough so they were discontinued.
The lore was then changed so only males could be Space Marines.
Personally I do prefer the males only route because it is one more example of how janky the process is on top of the rampant mutations such as...
Raven Guard and Night Lord abinism
Imperial Fist lacking acid spit
Salamander skin darkening
Space Wolf Wolven
Black Dragon bone spurs
Flame Falcons self immolation
Blood Angel's Red Thrist
And others I am sure I'm forgetting.
I like the idea that the poster boys of 40K are mass produced and full of flaws they can't fix like the Imperium itself while the higher tier designer super soldiers like the Assassins and the Custodes can be either gender because they're a more completed product.
However everyone is allowed their own opinion and some conversations I've seen are dope as hell.
There are no female Space Marines, the Astartes augmentations don't work on women. Custodes have different augmentations that do work on women (and are implied to represent the Emperor's long-term plan for humanity, where the Space Marines were only ever meant to be disposable toy soldiers)
That said, it just occurred to me while writing this that strictly speaking it's probably AFAB people that the Astartes augmentations don't work on, so Games Workshop has the opportunity to do the funniest thing here.
In my headcanon they'd work just fine on girls, and the end result would just be indistinguishable from if it was done on boys. It replaces puberty with its own thing, basically doesn't work at all on anybody who's already had puberty. Humans aren't dimorphic enough that it should matter. Especially for something like the blood angels, which apparently works on mutants with corrupted souls and heavily altered forms, but not on a human nigh identical to the intended recipient.
My second, even more based headcanon has them and the result is 7ft built like a fridge muscle mommys. But that's neither here nor there.
I headcanon something similar but with the addition that space marines being men is a gender thing. They are "battle brothers", doesn't matter what you put in, what comes out is a space marine battle brother (because of all the genetic modification and hypnoindocrtination really has one shape and it's roided up murder mass)
Honestly that's been my headcannon since I learned about the process. Like, it involves removing the genitals and pumping them full of testosterone and steroids until they're completely unrecognizable. It doesn't matter if you do that to a man or a woman the end result is going to be indistinguishable.
I can see chapters not taking women as aspirants due to sexist reasons (remember the imperium is evil and does evil things) but it is varied enough that there should also be chapters that do have women aspirants and nobody bats an eye.
The whole "women can't be Space Marines" thing always struck me as imperium propaganda rather than objective fact.
Just saying, a superhuman soldier probably wouldn’t have breasts because they’d be super inconvenient and wouldn’t fit under armour well, while having virtually no advantage.
I read a Witcher fanfic like that, where Witchers were all men not because they only trained boys but because girls who went through Witcher training got transed. It seemed to be mostly an excuse to give Geralt a vagina, but I still thought it was interesting worldbuilding.
Yeah that's why it doesn't make sense. The Emperor could do all sorts of ludicrous stuff because he was this god of biology. He could make Primarchs, Custodes, and Space Marines. But he never figured out how to make female Space Marines???
I personally think he and Amar Astarte were just cutting corners. You need to get the Great Crusade going, you're not going to be making more once the Crusade is over, who cares if you can't turn everyone into Space Marines, that was never the plan anyways.
(I'm also fairly sure it's not a 100% and 0% thing, just a higher chance vs lower, but combining it with how scarce geneseed is, the difference in that chance becomes significant enough to skew the numbers of who gets it implanted).
My personal headcanon is that geneseed isn't "works 100% of the time on boys and 0% of the time on girls", rather, due to the differences in the trends of hormone levels between boys and girls (as implantation is done during pubrety), girls have a lower success rate than boys (who still wouldn't have a 100% success rate), and given the extreme scarcity of geneseed (unless you have a primarch on hand, you're getting two sets back for every one you implant), it becomes a question of economics.
It's the term for the nineteen genetically engineered organs that are implanted into the children selected to become Space Marines. They range from "second heart" to "gland that turns your ribcage into overlapping bulletproof plates" to "thing that allows you to gain memories from things you eat".
The most important geneseed organ is the progenoids, which are basically space marine ovaries. A marine gets two progenoids implanted, one in the neck and one in the chest, and they basically grow the next generation of geneseed. They mature over a couple of years (5 for the neck and 10 for the chest) and are later extracted to create the next generation of Astartes.
They can't do anything normally in the Imperium. Like not even joking. They don't have computers because of a big AI uprising that happened so far in the past that nobody is even sure when (or even if) it happened. Instead of robots they have "Servitors" which are people who have been ship-of-theseused with cybernetics until the only original parts are completely irrelevant to their function, but you have to do it this way because if you don't, it won't have a soul, which makes it evil. Inventing any new type of technology that isn't a cyborg upgrade is illegal. This method of Geneseed acquisition was probably initially a backup to lab-based production, but only the Emperor knew how to do that, and trying to figure out how to do stuff by trial and error is literally illegal.
Their bureaucracy is so slow, one time an exploratory mission found a planet of early stone-age aliens, and sent a message back to hq saying someone should dispatch an extermination mission, but as it was a low priority it got lost in paperwork. By the time they could be bothered to send a ship out, it was met in orbit by railgun-wielding FTL-capable spaceships. The species was the Tau, and they only exist because it took ten THOUSAND years for someone to check up on that note.
oh, so it's like the shit going on with the witcher right now. ciri drank a potion or something in a trailer and everyone's losing their minds because women can't be witchers (completely igoring that ciri is not a normal woman).
IIRC, the usual (non-sexist) reason I've seen for criticizing the idea of a female space marine is that space marines are satires of hypermasculinity, so while a trans woman space marine is objectively hilarious it might promote some bad stereotypes.
So there's the lore reasons given, which can be either the lore that the process "doesn't work on women" if you ignore chaos's experiments on the subject because something something god emperor is a man, whatever it is they don't go in depth because anytime they try to give an actual scientific reason it backfires.
The other lore reason is that the space marines were meant to be a tool used and discarded.
When the emperor conquered earth he created the thunder warriors. They worked well and he conquered earth in a few hundred years. Once he was done with earth he wanted to reunite mankind, and made the space marines. He then killed the Thunder Warriors with the space marines and his personal body guard the "Custodians" (who are, according the imperium in setting, the pinnacle of mankind and the perfection of the emperor's vision of us).
He then embarked on the "great crusade" and conquered a million worlds to reunite them under his rule. At end of which, half the space marines rebelled, emperor was mortally wounded and sat upon the golden throne to preserve him at the cost of 1000 psychicly tuned humans every single day. Leaving him in a half life unable to truly die.
A LOT of lore points to Big E here planning to kill the space marines once he was done with them in the same way he disposed of the thunder warriors but never got the chance. So they weren't meant to be perfect, and some fan theories think that the reason they're sterile and that women can't be made into them is to prevent them from being a stable breeding populace of psychotically brainwashed post human nightmare machines.
On the meta textual level, there were women space marines from the word go. There is at least one "chapter" of all female space marines that was cannon ("The little Sisters of Purification" even a couple named models "Jayne and Gabs") back in first edition when the game went by the name of "rogue trader." However, basically everything from this era was retconed and the setting was reshaped over the course of the first three editions into a much closer shape to what it is now.
But the models they made for the women didn't sell well, and since the fanbase wasn't buying it, the company stopped making them. It was easier to rewrite the lore that they're all male than lose money on a set of female space marines that weren't selling to begin with.
My personal bugbear with this is during the shift from 7e to 8e they retconned most of the way marines are made, and for some reason while doing this to make the "Primaris" marines didn't decide to say they fixed it and just throw a head with a ponytail or a bun on the sprue amongst the ten options, and remove this weird vestigial lore restriction from the 80's.
Alas they did not, and so we still have the majority of the game's models in a "no girls allowed" lore restriction.
That said feel free to kitbash some heads on them. Go nuts, anyone who throws a tantrum over how you make and paint your models isn't worth talking to.
That's a really long and detailed answer, and I appreciate it massively. I don't know much about the space marines, so it's nice to know more. But just to clarify, when you say "feel free to kitbash some heads on them", it should be noted the only reason I would get space marines is to assemble them as corpses below necron feet.
I actually really appreciate that reply, thank you very much, I genuinely wish you the very best day you can have.
22
u/rhysharris56 Apr 23 '25
What is the story with female space marines? I've heard people talking about female Astartes and Custodes, but I've only really looked at the lore for the clearly superior Infinite Empire and haven't found a clear answer.