Logistics, Not Lore: Warhammer 40K Legend Explains Why Female Space Marines Are Impossible

Warhammer 40,000 quietly made a big shift recently: female Adeptus Custodes are now part of the canon. That sounds simple, but it hits one of the most sensitive fault lines in the fandom, because for decades the game leaned hard into male-only super-soldiers. The kicker? That stance didn’t start with lore. It started with sales.

How we got 'no women in the golden armor' in the first place

Alan Merrett, who used to run design at Games Workshop, explained on Facebook that the early years weren’t allergic to female characters at all. In fact, when Citadel was building its old C range of minis, the plan was for roughly a quarter of the line to be women. The first big test case, C01 Fighters, went out to shops…and retailers kept telling GW their customers wouldn’t buy the female sculpts. Stores asked them to stop sending any in restocks. Merrett says he literally pulled those molds out of the production cycle.

"The reason there aren’t female Space Marines has nothing to do with lore… It’s to do with simple logistics of making miniatures and selling miniatures."

That decision bled into the fiction. The universe bent around what sold, which is why the canon calcified around male Space Marines and Custodes for so long.

The author perspective: not a retcon, just long-delayed

Aaron Dembski-Bowden, one of the key writers on The Horus Heresy, weighed in on Reddit’s r/40KLore to say he was all for female Custodes. He didn’t see their addition as a retcon so much as finally putting on the page what plenty of writers were already fine with. The problem, as he tells it, was timing and tooling. Miniatures being developed were designed as male, GW hesitated, and the fiction stayed vague. He also said he couldn’t speak to any culture-war angle inside the company and believed the reluctance came down to selling minis.

Translation: the authors were ready to write women into that part of the setting. The business side wasn’t ready to sell them.

Why the change hit a nerve

Because the official line stayed quiet for years, a lot of fans internalized the idea that only men could be Space Marines or Custodes. That messaging shaped expectations. So when GW flipped the switch and made female Custodes canon in recent editions, it felt abrupt to people who took the old presentation as an iron law rather than a market-driven artifact.

• Early plan: include many female minis in the Citadel C range (targeting around 25%).
• Reality: C01 Fighters underperformed on female sculpts; retailers asked GW to stop sending them.
• Result: female molds were pulled, and the fiction skewed male to match what was being produced and sold.
• Writers: some, like Aaron Dembski-Bowden, supported female Custodes (and even the idea of female Space Marines) but couldn’t push it through while the minis stayed male-only.
• Years of gendered language and male-only models cemented fan assumptions.
• Now: female Custodes are canon, which many read as a hard retcon even though authors say the intent was there for ages.

So... is this really a lore break?

Not really. It’s more a merchandising detour finally corrected. If GW had thrown in a line or two years ago leaving the door open, this would have landed way smoother. As for female Space Marines, that’s still the radioactive topic, and every small tweak in that direction gets treated like a five-alarm retcon. The Custodes change was always going to spark debate, but it’s hardly the wildest thing this setting has asked fans to accept.

Where do you land on female Custodes and the ongoing Space Marine conversation? Sound off below.