Games Workshop’s ongoing, fraught relationship with conservative elements of its Warhammer fanbase has led to increasing flashpoints whenever the miniatures maker has attempted to diversify the worldbuilding of its beloved tabletop game. But one lingering back-and-forth among fans simmering long before Games Workshop found itself in the crossfires of the culture war has been brought into light again thanks to the latest edition of one of its games: whether or not a female Space Marine could exist.
Last week Games Workshop opened pre-orders for the third edition of Horus Heresy, a Warhammer spinoff tabletop game set during the titular civil war, 10,000 years before the ongoing events of Warhammer 40K. Inspired by the beloved book series of the same name, Horus Heresy lets players live out the conflict between the loyal forces of the Imperium of Man and the Traitor Legions that fell to the corruption of Chaos under the sway of Horus Lupercal, the primarch of the Luna Wolves Space Marines who turned against the Emperor.
But as reviews and access to the new rulebooks for the latest edition have gotten into players hands, so too have they discovered that Games Workshop has rolled back specific mentions of gender when it comes to the process of creating a Space Marine as described in the lore within the new rulebook. As Wargamer reports, a sidebar section of the new rule book describing the Space Marine creation process titled “Process of Initiation” no longer explicitly acknowledges the necessity of gender for potential recruits
Although, of course, vague—the new rulebook does not go so far as to mention the possibility of female Marines but simply removes any discussion of gender from the process entirely—it stands in stark contrast to the rulebook for the game’s second edition released in 2022, which was criticized by progressives at the time for its specific notation that the creation of a Space Marine requires the “hormonal and biological make-up of the human male,” for its parallels to transphobic language around trans identities.
Putting aside the fact that this is a heavily fictionalized process, the creation of a Space Marine has always been a transhumanist idea regardless of any particular gender binary, even if Warhammer‘s world has, up to this point, kept Space Marines as masculine identities in both the fiction around 40K and the miniatures it offers.
The process of elevating a human into a Space Marine relies on chemical, hormonal, and surgical transformation, adding extra organs and increasing the physical density and strength of their bodies to become a superhuman ideal. Even though the science behind it is fiction, there is nothing inherently gendered about it despite what the previous edition stated. If anything, it’s easy to see why fans have expressed interest in seeing female Marines or reading allegories of trans identity into them.
The question of whether or not female-presenting Space Marines could be possible in Warhammer 40K‘s setting, then, has been the topic of debate for fans for a long time, well before Horus Heresy‘s rulebooks clumsily waded in and out of that debate in the last few years. Games Workshop has, outside of that 2022 rulebook, had a hands-off approach to that debate themselves, largely leaving the Space Marines, 40K‘s most popular faction (and the face of the company, for better or worse), out of its attempts to diversify its storytelling and model offerings. Instead, it’s simply been left open to players themselves to come up with their own custom miniatures and headcanons to incorporate female forces into their own imaginings of the Adeptus Astartes.
The closest Games Workshop itself arguably came to advancing the matter in an official capacity came last year when it introduced a female member of the Emperor’s personal guard, the Adeptus Custodes (a faction that is distinct from, but adjacent to, the Space Marines), for the first time in Warhammer fiction. The addition—alongside a statement from Games Workshop declaring that female Custodes had always existed despite a lack of representation in either the fiction or in physical tabletop product in an official capacity—centered the company as a target of right-wing cultural commentators eager to present the choice as a capitulation to “wokeness.”
It was the latest in a series of recent examples that strained Games Workshop’s reconciliation of its own progressive values and ideas as a company with segments of its audience that do not see Warhammer 40K‘s grim, dark future as the satire of conservative and authoritarian politics that the company has long struggled to communicate the intent of. But the decision to explicitly remove the gendered language from the latest edition of Horus Heresy at least indicates the company’s desire to continue making steps to reflect the broader diversity of Warhammer‘s player base in spite of these struggles with its complicated legacy in the culture war.
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