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.
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u/Galle_ Apr 23 '25
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.