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How do?

Now I'm not trying to twist some obscure bit of fluff for this, it's just based on an obvious observation.

As we know, the Sisters of Silence are all Blanks, also known as Pariahs. We also know that Blanks are stupendously, ridiculously rare.

Whilst gathering them into one place to create a specialised military force makes sense....effectively reducing your recruitment pool by 50% just doesn't. I suppose it is possible that females demonstrate the Pariah Gene more often, but that still doesn't adequately explain why men are excluded from the order entirely.

There also seems to be a surprising number of them.

And it got me thinking. Between the two observations above, I just cannot and do not accept their existence is at all natural. So what are the alternatives?

Well, the first one I'll present is probably the most outrageous. Prior to the Primarch project, The Emperor attempted a 'test run' - building on the primitive Thunder Warrior project. And that project was a success, of sorts. I don't think it's unfeasible that the resultant being was an accidental Blank, some fundamental part of its soul left out, like a suspiciously spare screw in flatpack furniture. Being a smart cookie, The Emperor recognised this was something he could weaponise. If we assume the same gender lock we see in Astartes, if that creation was nominally female, that could explain why Sisters of Silence are all female.

The second one? They're clones. We know cloning is most definitely A Thing in the 31st Millenium. Given the manifest horrors of Old Night, I can see a definite interested in cloning Blanks. It could be the process worked first with a female template, or perhaps they couldn't get male clones to 'work' - it could also have been a deliberate decision to prevent the cloned Blanks breeding.

What do you reckon Dakka? What's your take? The two above are just possibilities, and I'm sure others will have their own theories. Let's share and discuss, yeah?

Male blanks are trained as Culexus Assassins, I don't think there is any sort of gender imbalance, just different career paths.

Females can be culuxeus assassins as well. I think it's just a bit of an attempt at gender balance on the table.

The Sisters are just an order of female pariahs. They're not super humans like space marines. No Primarch equivalent.

Well we know that.

But why the gender limitation when your choice is already severely limited?

And given the rarity of Blanks, so rare most don't know they even exist (see Jurgen in the excellent Cain series), how come there's so many on Luna?

The Emperor has his right to have a arbitrary proyect. If he want a blank-female army like Gadafi he can!

I thought it was the Necrons that created the Blank gene to use against the Old Ones and their psychic slave races?

However, we know that the Emperor acknowledged the value of gene experiments undertaken before him, such as the creation of the Navigators.
I can cerainly see him recognising ithe Blank gene's worth and incorporating it into his gene experiments to accidently create the Sisters if Silence.

As you mention, the initial process could have been easier to perform on women.
Now the tradition of using women is dogmatically followed by the Imperium bespite there being an even gender distribution in 'natural' Blanks.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well we know that.

But why the gender limitation when your choice is already severely limited?

And given the rarity of Blanks, so rare most don't know they even exist (see Jurgen in the excellent Cain series), how come there's so many on Luna?

Because they've either been collected from imperium-wide or cloned (like the protiphage in nemesis). The latter would make the gender issue make sense.

At the same time, blanks are rare but not *that* rare. Gregor Eisenhorn, a single inquisitor, put together a few dozen blanks from the population of a single sector. Apply the resources of the adeptus telepathica astra imperium-wide...

It may very well be that the Emperor did not create the Sisters of Silence at all, that they were an already existing group of female blanks that the Emperor convinced to join him.

Alternatively, HH book 7 hints that the origins of the Sisters of Silence were as an all-female Imperial Army regiment that just so happened to include a lot of blanks. This accidentally came to light and Imperial authorities quickly realised the potential.

The Sisters of Silence being all-female likely is just some kind of ancient tradition dating back to their founding, and the Imperium is pretty big on its traditions. That is a far more likely explanation imho than those given in the OP.

Probably selective breeding combined with some genetic tweaking to enhance there abilities, with the occasional batch of "new blood" collected from around the Imperium
Why are they all women? Well it is possible that the pariah gene is expressed more in females. But also if your going to lab breed humans with a super rare gene then IMO they would be much more valuable due to the(relative to male sperm) small number of eggs they can provide. So the majority of embryos are probably engineered to be female, with the odd male to act as a donor.

If you mean they have a supreme commander like the Primarchs, probably. Every organization in the Imperium always have a head honcho of some kind.

If you mean that there is a genetically modified progenitor of female blanks whos genetic material is used to forcibly turn women into Sisters of Silence...probably not. There's not even that much hint that the Sisters of Silence are even genetically modified beyond their Blank status.

There are cloning procedures that only produce females, if you had a cloned army that had to start from a smaller sample group you might have to start with all females, if you never expanded the program with more samples you would have to remain all female.

Perhaps SoS can virgin birth, like lizards, but due to the differences between lizard and human chromosomes the products of such a birth would only be able to be human.

To be honest, I just think the SoS are a joke organisation someone made after being given 'The Silent Treatement' by their Signifcant Other.

Hmmm, personally I rather like the idea that they're a holdover from some old Terran weirdness during the Old Night. Some strange gene-crafter found that you can either induce Blankness in women through some esoteric process, or create blanks through cloning. Absolutely like some Gadafi-like Terran Warlord to create himself an all-female army of Blanks, so his cloning process throws up blanks that are women.

Either that or it could be some pre-Old Night breeding programme like the Bene Gesserit, which throws up more Blanks that are women throughout the entire galactic population.

They're all females because emperor knows the best. I bet there's a good reason for this.

I was under the impression they were already existent as an order on Luna, long before Mr Emperor Sir nipped up there having unified Terra?

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I was under the impression they were already existent as an order on Luna, long before Mr Emperor Sir nipped up there having unified Terra?

If that's true it would fit perfectly with the 'weird gene-crafted order' idea. The inhabitants of Luna were noted gene-crafters, and their chimerics caused the Emperor's burgeoning Crusade some trouble in its early days.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Well we know that.

But why the gender limitation when your choice is already severely limited?

And given the rarity of Blanks, so rare most don't know they even exist (see Jurgen in the excellent Cain series), how come there's so many on Luna?

40k theories did make a video that while it may be a theory it still could explain this decision but still we should take it with a grain of salt
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2xduMCFAeg