>>116613724Bob Budiansky, the original US writer, wanted to make half the cast female, Hasbro shot it down. That's more fun trivia than pertinent. The canon didn't identify them as agender/lacking gender/whatever, the canon just never addressed it at all until Elita-1 and her team were introduced. The comics didn't use them or Ariel. Arcee became sort of unavoidable because of how she starred in a whole season, and not an odd one off. Furman had taken over the UK and US comics by then, and he was trying to apply more logic to the story as a whole. He felt the species should be genderless as a whole, because ya know, robots. He felt all instances of "he" and "him" were just a quirk of translating Cybertronian into English. He introduced Arcee in a one off story where Optimus made a pleasing fembot to be a sort of liaison to Earth. The crowd was creeped out then she was ignored. Well too bad for Furman, but every other version of Transformers since then had only added more fembots, all without any real sci-fi logic to why the Cybertronian race had them. So when he got to do the IDW G1 continuity, he had an evil scientist force a female gender on Arcee, driving her crazy. Essentially a Joseph Mengele experiment creating a trans Transformer. This obviously eventually caused further problems as its A, very fucked up, and B, there are a lot more fembots than Arcee, and people want to see them. So eventually they were all introduced as chiefly living in offfworld colonies, with a very last minute retcon to Arcee making her actually voluntarily trans with poor medical care driving her a bit nuts. I don't expect any other version of Transformers, free of Furman's 'tism, to ever make her trans again. Though I wouldn't be surprised if other bots are shown to be thus over time.