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Calbear wrote:

Charax wrote:

Incorrect. Originally Custodes had no gender bias. No mention of the Custodes between Rogue Trader and 7th edition said anything about any kind of any kind of gender makeup, they were not explicitly all male, nor were female custodes explicitly forbidden
Then the 8th edition codex came out and said that the sons of Noble houses were sent to become custodes, no pseudo-scientific "genetically incompatible" nonsense, they just said "sons" instead of "children"
That same wording was carried over to the 9th edition codex until we got female custodes in 10th edition. Even the "Visions Of" books, which had both sisters of silence and custodes, didn't say anything about the custodes being all-male, while the sisters were explicitly all female

So 1987-2018 - 31 years of no explicit or implicit gender bias
2018-2024 - 6 years of explicitly all male
2024 onwards - explicitly gender neutral

This is why the nonsense about female custodes is so inane, all they did was return to the previous status quo, it's just that hardly anyone bothered reading any custodes lore before they got shiny new models and a codex so they assumed they'd always been all-male

I don't want to get into this dumb debate, but assuming Adeptus Custodes were all-male wasn't just some ignorant assumption before 2024. People did it because literally every single Custodes model shown and every Custodes character in the lore was male. It didn't matter that there wasn't an explicit line saying "Custodes can only be men". Refusing to create female Custodes until now was all the evidence needed. There wasn't even a hint or a single counterexample in 37 years of 40k for there being female Custodes anywhere in 40k lore until now.

But hey, if you wanna deny inference, go ahead.

This is what we call implicit gender bias where male is unconsciously the default and you have to specify female for women to even be considered a part of it. Which in model cases apparently means boobs on armour or it's a man.

There was never anything that said the custodes were mono gendered. Assuming such is on you, not on them. And 'all custodes had been male until now' is untrue unless your metric for female has to be boobs on armour, because that seems to be how we're defining it - all previous custodes images lacked boobs therefore they must be men. Another assumption. And given that the tithes character was a woman and wore non enboobened armour, that puts paid to any notion that the previous examples had to all be men.

So no, it was an assumption based on audience gender bias and it's a pretty weird one given all the other aspects of 40k. For decades there were only male guard models but the lore said there were women too, but the model and images never said so, yet everyone accepted it. The marines lore has to specify women can't be marines, which they didn't have to do if we just had to infer based on lack of female characters models and imagery - their armour has no boobs and all depictions of unhelmeted ones had masculine faces.

Custodes models and art were actually more pro female members than the guard by the metrics you've used - we know that female custodes wear armour that doesn't have boobs, so their models are not obviously gendered, and the art reflects that. Guard were explicitly drawn as all men and sculpted as all men until the 2000s - Lesk is one of the earliest female guard characters I've seen drawn on official GW material. Yet no one had a problem with the idea that there were female guard, even if literally every depiction not in writing was male.

But as soon as the elite power fantasy guys are women, people lose their minds, despite it having no bigger difference that the way guard had existed.


The most egregious retconn of the Custodes in my mind is that they're now everywhere BUT actually guarding the emperor (yes I know not all of them leave terra), making the concept of being his custodian guard ridiculous. It is a far bigger lore stretch and contrivance in order to sell another super army, than who you can recruit to be one. They are there to guard his body and spreading them out across the galaxy doesn't do that.