>>8050012the short version is, Furman put in a hard moratorium, no females, they are robots end of story, this rule was kept to early in IDW but eventually writers wanted to use the character of Arcee, in order to facilitate it she was the result of Jihaxxus experimenting on a normal bot, and turning him female, in an experiment to introduce gender to the species, this resulted in a bitter anti-hero Arcee who resented what she was made into and yet paradoxically couldn't reject her new self.
this got even dumber when in order to use more female characters it was retconned that females did exist but for some reason (if it was explained I dont recall it) cybertron lacked them but many others could be found on colonies like Eukaris and most especially Caminus.
this put Arcee herself in an awkward spot for her character and instead of trying to have herself fixed she was "accepting" herself.
on top of that, missing Furman's point, romance was alive and well on cybertron, with gay love being the norm due to a lack of ladies, under the justification "they're robots gender dosn't matter"
Furman himself has never been fond of transformers having girls because of his take ont hem, being robots, no gender, no mates, no romance, hell when the old marvel comics added Arcee her origin there was that the autobots commissioned her creation to satisfy angry feminists. and this style carries into his contributions to Transformers Earth Wars, depicting the Torchbearers as goofy straw feminist stereotypes.
