Luke warm take: I don't mind the female Transformers having more "feminine" designs. I honestly didn't even know that was discourse until I saw tiktoks about it.
The feminine designs aren't so drastic that they distract from everything. In modern day, and it's not making the female transformers more sexual than male Transformers (like the sterotyical "male video game character vs female video game character" thing). It's mostly just making female Transformers smaller and slightly slimmer. They put larger lips on a lot of them which resembles lipstick, which I guess could be a gripe, but it's not like it's overly distracting or anything, and it's not really that noticable. Other than that, they look completely normal. Hell, the smaller and slimmer thing doesn't even happen in some media, and the female Transformers might just have chest plating that looks like breast armor.
I think it comes from the "they're robots, so why should they have gendered appearances?" thing. To that I say; I like seeing characters with more female-like bodies not being seen as weak and female character designs that areb't overly sexualized or weirdly human-like compared to the male characters.
Shout out to female Transformers. They could never make me hate you <3
Also, more modern approaches have been getting more liberal with the designs and ignoring gendered stuff, so it's not like it's a MUST that female Transformers have to be slimmer and all.
Ex for "masc" (more gender neutral since I don't think most obots look one gender or the other-) looking female transformers: Aileron in IDW, Elita 1 in Cyberworld, Twitch in Earthspark, Strongarm in RID 2015, Velocity in IDW, Chromia in Transformers One. I'm not going to name them all, but you get the gist.
Male Transformers that have a more "feminine" build (aka, smaller, slimmer waist, chest that pokes out more): Swerve in IDW, Rung in IDW, Rewind in IDW, Rodimus Prime in MTMTE, First Aid in IDW, Starscream in TFP, plz do not expect me to name all of them, I'm tired.
Making this post has also made me realize that a lot more of the designs in modern day are more gender neutral than anything with only slight changes in design that can indicate a Transformer is female. Like, I'm sorry, if you took away they're lipstick, I would NOT be able to yell who's male and who's female.
Tldr: I don't get why people complain about female transformers having more feminine designs. Maybe it's bcuz we're sick of overly gendered things, maybe it's fear that they'll be sexualized (this fandom sexualizes men WAAAYYYY more than they sexualize the women), or maybe it's even an internalized mysoginy thing where we associate feminine design = weaker, and then we get frustrated at the female transformers being "weaker" (they're not, but internalized mysoginy is a BITCH that everyone knows and it is inside all of us 😔)
Edit: Someone said that it's bcuz saying the bots HAVE to look feminine perpetuates the stereotype that all female characters have to be small with wide hips and thin waist, and I get that. What I'm refrering to is people being like, "The female transformers will never look as cool as the male transformers because they're not buff and big (masculine standard)." I'm talking about female transformers looking cool while NOT being typically "buff and big", I'm mostly talking about IDW since a lot of the cartoons fall into that trap, and my brain decided that IDW is the default for some reason. Shout out to IDW for having a wide variety of diverse body types for many of their characters. <3
