Comics writer Simon Furman took the position that Transformers were asexual machines who had no genders. Although Arcee originally appeared in the 1986 Transformers movie, she did not appear in comics until 1989. In the Marvel UK story "Prime's Rib," Optimus Prime deliberately manufactures Arcee as an ostensibly female robot in an attempt to appease a mob of angry human feminists (yes, really). Furman later revised Arcee's origins in the 2008 IDW issue of "Transformers: Spotlight." In this story, Arcee began life as a typically gender-neutral Autobot who was then modified by Jhiaxus in an attempt to arbitrarily introduce the concept of gender to the Cybertronian species. This could be interpreted as the first time Arcee was identified as transgender, as the modifications made to her could be seen as analogous to a gender reassignment surgery.

This is so bizarre to get angry at lol. The entire point of robots is that they're not "regular women" or humans at all. They act based on the information fed to them. This is about as normal/regular as it gets. Ironically, it says that this Jhiaxus character introduced 'gender ideology' to a robot that otherwise wouldn't have one, so it's not really Arcee's fault because she never asked for it.