Board Thread:Warhammer 40k General Discussion/@comment-7699236-20150618150629/@comment-7699236-20151214203532

Here's another reason female Space Marines may have existed.

In the days of the Great Crusade (and I'm talking about mere years) the situation the Emperor was in was pretty dire. At a time like that he wouldn't have the leisure of choosing his recruits for genetic enhancements, so he would've been forced to take in as many viable people as possible, including women. Granted, this does mean that this situation only applies to the super-humans before the Space Marines, the Thunder Warriors, but if you're planning a conquest of the entire galaxy from a start of one planet you'll want all the help you can get. But after a while the Emperor probably could increase the numbers of male SM while reducing the rate of recruitment for female SM, until they become a small enough part of the Imperium that he can just freeze them and pretend they never existed. Why? Patriarchal society syndrome.

If these female SMs do get re-awakened ( I.e. some inquisitor finding some old piece of text dating back to the Great Crusade listing the names of a legion with a few female SMs and deciding to look further into it, leading him on an epic quest that would probably have it's own series) then it would be interesting to see how they, knowing the Emperor to be a simple mortal because they were living in his time, would react to the fanatical Imperium, who would probably reject them anyway because SMs are supposed to be made in the Emperor's image and female SMs would disrupt that belief and might even discredit the Ecclesiarchy, which is the last thing the Imperium wants.

This isn't about how female SMs could be created. This is about female SMs who have already been made by the Emperor who had access to far superior technology than present-day Imperium.

However, a typical Chaos warband can only take in recruits from world's that they raid. Since their everlasting ambition is to destroy the Imperium (and everyone else) they would want to take in as many recuits as possible without compromising their quality. I think a Chaos warband desperate enough to attempt it would eventually find a way to make female SMs. Because Chaos. Or because the aforementioned females SMs, excommunicated and hunted out of the Imperium, would join them out of desperation, enabling the Chaos Space Marines to use their female Gene-seed.

All of this does open the rather interesting question of a female Primarch, and whether she's already dead, frozen or biding her (or their?) time for the final Aopcalypse. And whose's side would she be on?

GWS really needs to advance their canon.