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Representation in the Warhammer 40k Universe: This is About More Than Female Space Marines

There has been a lot of talk for a long time about the pros and cons of female Space Marines. On the pro side, people have been saying that the Space Marines–as much as they are bad guys–are essentially the protagonists of Warhammer 40k. They are the poster children of Games Workshop, and they are frequently spoken of in noble tones with words like, well, “nobility”, but also “brethren”, “honorable”, “saviors”, “the best of us”, and on and on. Space Marines are the best of the best, and, the pro-Female Space Marines advocates say, women should be included among their ranks.

The people who disagree say things like “the lore has been clear about this from a very early time” (it’s been clear since 2nd Edition Warhammer 40k). The lore makes it clear that these are men and men only, and to change the lore is to erase a significant portion of the hobby’s foundations. Besides, there are female armies elsewhere: play Sisters of Silence or Sisters of Battle if you want to play female armies. (Heck, even Imperial Guard and Leagues of Votann and Aeldari and Drukhari all have female models.)

Here’s where the problem lies.

Games Workshop has been notably mum on the subject, which has led many people to think that that particular piece of lore was going to fade away and that Belisarius Cawl was going to, one day, reach into his bag of tricks and produce a female Space Marine.

BUT: With the Horus Heresy rulebook, Games Workshop doubled down on this, after years of silence, and included the following line:

“The process by which Space Marines are created relies inherently on the hormonal and biological make-up of the human male, meaning that only males can be subjected to the transformation.”

Now, let’s ignore biology for one minute (because this sentence is one of the most non-scientific pieces of lore that’s ever been presented), but let’s talk about a deeper issue.

(For starters, there is an open letter to Games Workshop that has been circulating and gaining signatures which makes many excellent points and which I added my name to yesterday. You can find a link to it here.)

The Responsibility of the Authors

Disclaimer: I am WELL AWARE that people will push back on this, but I don’t care terribly much. If you push back, leave a comment (and if the comment section is broken–which it tends to be–you can @ me on Twitter at @robisonwells).

I, as I have been open about, am not merely a wargaming website writer, but I am a New York Times bestselling author of science fiction and thrillers. I have 15 books under my belt and I have been published in 14 different languages. So I know a little about publishing.

And yet I wrote a book that I have done my best to quash, because I did not appropriately address the needs of a marginalized audience. In the book, which dealt with the indigenous population of the Americas, and especially with their past and their religious beliefs, I did a small amount of research into “is this going to be offensive?” I had my story, and I wanted to tell the story, but it all hinged on one thing in particular–the origin of a specific tribe of Native Americans. And it was done through a science fiction explanation.

Now, this has been done before historically. There are many works that have said that this historical figure was an alien, or that historical figure was a time traveler, or this other historical figure was in a multiverse. It’s been done, and I was thinking while I was writing my book that this had been done and that I was free to do the same thing.

What I NEGLECTED to realize, is that this has been done a lot IN THE PAST, because it is not done anymore. And why is it not done anymore? Because it’s been considered racially insensitive.

{Pause for some people to complain about how readers are too sensitive and “political correctness is ruining our literature” and blah blah blah.

But here’s the thing:

Definitely Very Offensive and Not Appropriate

I sent out this manuscript, which I finished it, to sensitivity readers. Specifically, I sent it out to members of this particular Native American tribe.

(I should make it clear here that I THOUGHT I was smart about all of this. I literally lived on the reservation for two years and had all kinds of cultural and religious interaction with this tribe and other nearby tribes.

So I sent the book to someone in particular who was a political representative of their culture. Who better to represent it?

Their criticism:

“I’m also sorry if this comes across as harsh, but the [Native American] elements in the story are definitely very offensive and not appropriate.”

“I would imagine [members of this tribe] and other readers would be very upset reading about such aspects of our culture such as language, ceremony, culture, and dress in the context of this story.”

So what did I do?

I did not scrap the book. I tweaked it. I tried to minimize some things. I tried to take the edge off. But I never addressed the full scope of the problem.

And the book came out, and it got good reviews from a couple of trade publications, and it sold a lot of copies, and it offended a lot of people.

I have since removed the book from my website. I do not promote it. If I could stop the sale of it, I would. The point is: I was in control of the narrative, I knew there were people who were sensitive, and I ignored some pretty direct criticism.

What Does This Have to Do With Games Workshop?

Well, for starters, I want to say that while this is all directed at Games Workshop, there are a lot of miniature wargaming companies who are equally bad. There are other companies who do not have big enough representation, and there are other companies who present female models in sexualized lights, and there are other companies who are are exclusionary of minorities.

But the fact is: Games Workshop is big kid on the block and they are going to be held responsible for the influence that is had on the rest of the market. (After all, where would Wargames Atlantic be if they weren’t producing Games Workshop proxies? Where would One Page Rules be if they didn’t lean heavily on Games Workshop lore and aesthetic? Where would independent 3rd party retailers be, like Victoria Miniatures and Anvil Industries, if they weren’t producing parts and pieces to be incorporated into Games Workshop kitbashes?

(Admittedly, some of these 3rd party companies purposely sell things like female heads to use on traditionally male Warhammer 40k models. But the point is: Games Workshop is the major influencer of the hobby. So Games Workshop bears responsibility as the trend setter.)

And there was NO REASON for them to need to include that line about male marines in the Horus Heresy Age of Darkness box. No reason at all. Past lore has hinted at it, and thirty years ago there was explicit lore about it, but generally speaking, it’s just kind of been left up to players’ imagination and headcanon. And then Games Workshop printed this in this massive book that a million people are going to buy, and they put a nail in the coffin.

This Isn’t Just About Female Space Marines

The reason that I included my story about the book I wrote is that this issue is not about the presence or non-presence of female Space Marines. This is an issue about representation in a time where LGBT rights–with an emphasis on the T–are coming heavily under fire. They’re under fire in the United States where the Texas GOP just put forward a platform that “opposes all efforts to validate transgender identity.” Things are just as bad in the United Kingdom. First, the politicians were saying they were trying to protect children, and now they’re coming right out and saying that being trans should be illegal, full stop.

When Games Workshop writes in their Horus Heresy book about “The process by which Space Marines are created relies inherently on the hormonal and biological make-up of the human male, meaning that only males can be subjected to the transformation.” they are saying that not only don’t they believe that their magic and mystifying futuristic spaceman science can’t understand the “hormonal and biological make-up the human male” but they’re also saying that they don’t understand current 2022 AD understanding of “hormonal and biological make-up of the human male”. Because that’s NOT HOW BIOLOGY WORKS.

For starters, men are made up of female DNA. That’s how it works. You get half your DNA from your mother. Second, men have estrogen and women have testosterone. Those are the hormonal differences, I assume? And when trans people undergo hormone replacement therapy, things balance out pretty neatly between the genders. As for biological make-up, are they just talking about a penis? Is that what’s required to be a Space Marine?

There’s no amount of irony here that:

• Space Marines are “upgraded” with extreme biophysical therapy which adds 20-odd organs to their bodies, including cuckoo bananas ones like a second heart and the black carapace. Are you saying they couldn’t, you know, add a penis? (Assuming that’s ESSENTIAL.)
• By the time that a young boy is transformed into a hulking brute of a Space Marine, he has undergone so many changes that he is unrecognizable to his former family. Could not the same thing be done to girls?

But You Can Just Headswap Female Heads Onto Your Space Marines!

That’s NOT THE POINT. The point is that this hobby is, according to Games Workshop’s aggressive campaign, “for everyone”, and yet they are excluding women and girls from playing the poster children of the lore, the supposed protagonists, the troops that are always held up as the best and the bravest, for dumb reasons that only encourage neckbeardy gatekeepers.

“But I want to play a female army!” “Then play Sisters of Battle!”

This, my dudes, is what we in the civil rights circles like to refer to as “separate but equal”. For a refresher (especially for my friends across the pond), during the civil rights era, the Supreme Court, in a terrible ruling, ruled that segregation between whites and blacks was perfectly fine as long as they got “separate but equal” treatment.

But it was NOT fine. Because that’s not how segregation works. It led to poor schools with poor funding and lack of teachers and supplies, and it led to neighborhoods that were segregated by who was and wasn’t allowed to live on what street–and, because black people were suffering from prejudice they weren’t getting great jobs, so the black neighborhoods became the ghettos, and the white neighborhoods became the cheerful suburbs, and it was a policy that self-perpetuated and–even though “separate but equal” has long since been overturned–the damage was done.

Oh, you’re a girl? Then play this all-girl army. No, they’re not as powerful as Space Marines and they don’t have nearly the model range and no they don’t get the same level of support and no they don’t get new models every month. But they do have high heels and boob armor!

Conclusion

Look, I know that this article is not going to change a lot of minds. People are too entrenched in lore-as-scripture for that to happen. But what I do want you to do is to read and, if inclined, sign this open letter to Games Workshop.

The glimmer of hope: The Horus Heresy only had male Space Marines, according to this new lore. But The Horus Heresy has only had firstborn marines, too. If 10,000 years of Cawl’s experiments can create Primaris, what’s to say that 10th edition Cawl won’t spring it on us that he’s found a way that women can be Space Marines, too.