Why aren’t there any female Space Marines? It’s a vexed question, with several meanings – on the one hand, what is the Warhammer 40k lore reason for Space Marines all being male? On the other, what are the historical reasons behind Games Workshop’s choice not to make female Space Marine models? This guide aims to explore each issue in turn.
Space Marines are the premier Warhammer 40k faction, with starring roles in Warhammer 40k books and Warhammer 40k starter sets, not to mention great Warhammer 40k games like the upcoming Space Marine 2. People love them – some don’t want them to change, others want them to have opportunities for more kinds of story. Frustratingly, as editor Alex Evans argues, the hypothetical existence of female Space Marines has become the Warhammer community’s most contentious social issue.
Here’s what you need to know about female Space Marines:
- Has Games Workshop ever made female Space Marines?
- Why doesn’t Games Workshop make female Space Marines?
- What does the lore say about female Space Marines?
- Why do people want female Space Marines?
- What would change if we had female Space Marines?
Has Games Workshop ever made female Space Marines?
Games Workshop has never released official models for female Space Marines, but they have been designed for it. In 1987, in the run-up to the launch of Rogue Trader, the first edition of Warhammer 40k, the GW design studio was busily iterating through possible designs for the Space Marines.
According to Alan Merrett, the head of studio at the time and Games Workshop’s former manager of Intellectual Property, two female Space Marine designs were created in this process – something he speaks to in response to a post in the Oldhammer Community facebook group in 2018.
However, these models were not released as part of the Space Marines range. Instead they were released as Female Warrior Gab and Female Warrior Jayne in the RT601 -Space Adventurers line.
Unconnected to Games Workshop, Challenger Magazine published a Rogue Trader scenario called ‘Sunstroke’ starring the female Space Marine chapter ‘The Little Sisters of Purification’.
Why doesn’t Games Workshop make female Space Marines?
According to Alan Merrett, a manager at Games Workshop since before the creation of Warhammer 40k and its head of IP until as recently as 2016, business factors were behind the decision not to release any female Space Marines.
Games Workshop’s first miniature lines were Dungeons and Dragons miniatures. According to Merrett, the firm had planned to make at least 25% of its hero models female. But after producing its first models, the firm found “retailers kept complaining to us that customers weren’t buying the female models and could we not include any in their restocks”.
When it came time to launch the Space Marines, the flagship miniature range for the new flagship game, the firm was certain that “if every Marine blister had a female model as one of the three Marines” people would complain. So it simply chose not to put them into production.
As Merrett says in one of the posts: “all the background fluff about why there are only male Marines is there to justify a commercial logistics issue”.
Making models for female Space Marines would mean changing long-established lore, either by retcon, or by developing something new.
What does the lore say about female Space Marines?
Since GW decided that Space Marines would all be male, the lore has consistently reinforced this. Space Marines are created by implanting special organs into an adolescent boy, which together with chemotherapy and indoctrination turn him into a transhuman. The original template for creating a Space Marine was created by the Emperor of Mankind and a coterie of scientists, including Amar Astarte, from whom they draw their name.
Warhammer 40k lore is delivered piecemeal, but generally, it states that Space Marines have to be male because of the nature of the process that creates them.
Space Marine lore is not immutable, and has changed before. Recently, Belisarius Cawl of the Adeptus Mechanicus was able to improve on the Emperor’s work with the creation of the Primaris Space Marines; long-established lore held this to be impossible.
A more gradual development was the role of the Space Marine Primarchs. In Rogue Trader they were just Space Marine generals who fought for the Emperor, but during the 90s their narrative developed so that they were a higher order of being created by the Emperor’s superscience; much more recently, the Horus Heresy book Vengeful Spirit suggested (via unreliable narrators) that their essences are drawn partly from the realm of Chaos.
It’s worth noting that Space Marines are pure space fantasy, not sci-fi. As Dr. Joe Stammeijer explains in his guide to the Space Marine organs, it’s not just that we can’t yet make these organs – it’s that if the organs did what the lore says they do, most would be useless, actively harmful, or pointless.
Why do people want female Space Marines?
As contributor Gab Hernandez argues in her excellent feature, there are a variety of reasons why people want female Space Marines. Principally, it’s because:
A) Space Marines are cool as hell, and get the most support from Games Workshop, and they’d like female characters to be part of that.
B) The existing female first factions are nowhere near as deep and varied as the Space Marines.
If the Sisters of Battle received as much support as the Space Marines, desire for female Space Marines might drop off. That’s a tall order: Space Marines have a wealth of subfactions with extremely distinct aesthetics, unique models, and playstyles, and then there’s the sheer amount of media about them – the Horus Heresy book series is almost entirely dedicated to Space Marines deep lore.
I will add that, currently, an unpleasant minority of online Warhammer 40k fans are ready to harass strangers (and particularly female strangers) when they share unofficial homebrew, lore, or conversions, for female Space Marines. The fact that female Space Marines aren’t ‘official’ is sometimes used as an excuse for the harassment. I doubt that making female Space Marines official would change the behavior, but it would remove the excuse.
What would change if we had female Space Marines?
I’ve argued elsewhere that it seems very unlikely that Games Workshop will make female Space Marines any time soon. If it ever did, it would be very conservative. GW’s motive for creating female Space Marines would be to to sell them to the people who want them, but the Space Marine (as it exists now) is as important to GW as Mickey Mouse is to Disney – the biggest change it has ever made to that design was the Primaris marines in 2017, and that was basically just a (lore justified) scale increase.
Tonally, female Space Marines would be all but identical to male Space Marines. Space Marines are scarcely aware of gender, reproduction, and sexuality, and have no interest in these characteristics, other than calling one another brother. Going through the same indoctrination and physical transformation, female Space Marines would behave exactly the same as male Space Marines, and would look more or less identical as well. Female aspirants hoping to become Space Marines, being human, would have different experiences from male ones.
Adding them in via retroactive continuity – similar to had always been female Adeptus Custodes – would be dissonant. Unlike the Adeptus Custodes, who have been a very minor presence in the lore until the last ten years, Space Marines and their history have been very well established for a long time, and the Horus Heresy books explicitly state that they have always been an all-male institution. Given how much money GW makes from the Horus Heresy, this level of retcon seems unlikely.
Adding them to the lore via the innovations of Belisarius Cawl would probably create a new schism within the Imperium. While the Imperium isn’t typically as gendered as modern day earth – everyone, male or female, can die for the Emperor in the Astra Militarum – the Emperor’s design for Space Marines is considered holy, and some think that tampering with it is blasphemy. The Dawn of Fire novel series has several stories about the Chapters being unhappy with the Primaris reinforcements. This could make for some great stories.
The inclusion of female Space Marines would weaken the distinction between the Space Marines and the Sisters of Battle as they are currently presented. The Space Marines are warrior monks in power armor, while the Sisters of Battle are warrior nuns, and they make for a strong aesthetic pairing. But there are other distinctions between them.
Ever since Rogue Trader, the Sisters of Battle have been described as fanatical adherents of the Imperial Creed – this was back in the days when the Space Marines were little more than psychopaths and murderers in power armor. The Marines are (mostly) secular and worship the Emperor as a man, not a God, so there is a clear line of distinction between them that isn’t connected to gender. Making more of this could sharpen their identities.
Adding female Space Marines would also be a great excuse to bring back the Frateris Militia as part of the Sisters of Battle. These religious fanatics (of all genders) follow Ecclesiarchy crusades and act as an irregular army. Bringing them back would put more prominence on the religious mania aspect of the faction than the ‘female’ aspect.
All told, we think the assumption that female Space Marines would alter the tone of Warhammer 40k is unfounded, because – to be blunt – the least interesting part of a Space Marine is their genitals. As with any development to the lore, it would create many opportunities for interesting stories. Wargamer’s stance is that their introduction via retcon is unlikely – and I personally believe that they just aren’t going to happen any time soon.
And if you think the 40k lore is “sacred and unchanging”, we have eight massive retcons you need to know about!