Excerpted from a brief written by Autobot Skids, part of an informational packet presented to the members of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps in 1985, in the interest of fostering further interspecies understanding:
…The biology of much of life on Earth is really quite simple: Two genders. One of each gender couples together, some genetic material is exchanged, and in due time new members of the species are born. Those new individuals then proceed through successive larval stages until they are deemed mature, at which point they repeat the cycle. Human society is also simple yet, to us, chaotic and strangely unstructured. So, in both respects, we are quite different from humans.
Humans might be interested to know that we have no less than four genders. Or rather, we have three genders and one non-gender. It is thought that this is a byproduct of the rather convoluted way that our species came into existence, which is beyond the scope of discussion here. Whatever the case, approximately three-quarters of the population of Cybertron is gender-neutral, neither male nor female in any sense that a human would perceive. The other quarter of the population is gendered, either male or female. However, within the gendered portion of the population, there is a distinct skew: males outnumber females by almost twenty to one. That said, if two oppositely-gendered individuals happen to couple, they may produce a "child," which will mature in a manner somewhat analogous to the way in which a human child matures. The difference, for us, is that an offspring produced in this manner will never attain sentience by itself. It will forever remain simple and fairly mindless, functioning on only the most basic and instinctive level until it is provided with a spark; our sparks, as opposed to our bodies, are who we truly are and they are, in extreme cases, separable from our bodies.
New sparks can only come from, for lack of a better word that exists in your language, a queen. Our fourth gender, she is a female who differs from her fellow females only in that her spark has the inborn capability, given proper spark energy input from a male at the proper cyclical times in her life – a process regulated by a complex electrochemical drive initiated in both participants – to repeatedly divide into distinct new sparks without damage to her own. Each of the new sparks she produces has its own unique traits unrelated to her own and, once merged with a body, will provide the "newborn" Transformer with his or her own unique base personality that will grow and develop as time goes on.
The new sparks – usually about a dozen are produced at once – are harvested from the queen's body and stored in electrochemical stasis for future use. They are our future generations in waiting, usually merged with bodies that are simply constructed, although there is the much rarer case, described above, of offspring produced the "old-fashioned way," as you humans might say. So there are a few of us who exist who actually have three "parents," the two who contributed their body and the queen who contributed their spark. Most of us, however, have only an individual or individuals who built our body and the queen who produced our spark.
All of that said, it should come as no surprise that our societal organization is not built around gender or around any sort of familial structure. Rather, it is built around a caste structure. Traditionally, one's caste membership is a vastly more important factor than one's "parentage" or gender or anything else in determining one's place and status in our society. One's caste, like one's gender or lack thereof, is an inherent property of one's spark, so it is part of an individual from the moment of his or her "birth." There are – or, I should say, were – three castes.
In order of increasing size, the first is the royal caste, to which only queens and any offspring whom they have bred in both body and spark belong. Like her fellow females, a queen has the ability to produce offspring. However, in her case alone, she can produce "complete" offspring, in that they are born with an already-integrated spark. The queen's offspring are also, without exception, gendered. When the queen reaches the end of her life, one of her mature daughters undergoes a very demanding – physically as well as psychologically – transformational process in order to arise as the new queen. Traditionally, the queen is the ruler of our planet, in deference to the fact that it is she who insures the continuance of our species. In actual matter of fact, however, she is a symbol and a figurehead; a democratically-elected council, with a majority vote, can override any of her decisions. They, therefore, have far more political power than does the queen. The queen is – or, rather, was – an extremely powerful, central figure in our cultural subconscious, however, and that tended to override politics.
I say "was" because our queen, almost all of the members of her "family," and most of the council were deposed and killed by Megatron, after which he imposed planet-wide martial law under his sole authority. This was the incident which ultimately, though not immediately, precipitated the Great War that has been waged for thousands of years now on Cybertron and that, with the recent re-emergence of the Decepticons, has now spread here to Earth. Megatron systematically hunted down in particular the female royals in order to ensure his supremacy in the new societal order that he created, to make certain that no new queen would arise to challenge the authority that he gave himself. So the royal caste is now, for the most part, extinct. Only two royals survived Megatron's massacre. Both still survive, but both are male. As a result, there is genuine concern about the future survival of our species.
The second caste is the warrior caste. Their sole job, traditionally, is the defense of the royal caste and of Cybertron in general, at the cost of their own lives if necessary. Many of the warriors now identify themselves as Decepticons, as Megatron's revolt was originally a warrior caste uprising precipitated by the fact that the queen was not exactly benevolent to the warriors. She had distinct imperialistic tendencies and tended to see the warriors as mere cannon fodder to be disposed of as she saw fit, to further her aims and ambitions. The warriors grew deeply resentful of this, and rightfully so. However, they also have an inborn, instinctive dedication to protecting the royal caste at all costs, so it is only those warriors who were able to suppress that part of their nature who ended up supporting Megatron in both the short and the long term.
Many of the warrior caste ultimately chose not to support Megatron but also chose not to actively oppose him, either, perhaps reasoning that without a royal line to protect, their services were no longer required in any capacity. A number of warriors eventually chose to support the Autobot cause, once it was consolidated under Optimus Prime, fighting against their castemates and, in some cases, their friends. Their input and the training they have offered have obviously been invaluable to our cause.
The final and by far largest caste is the civil caste. Their job is to provide everything that our society requires aside from military offense/defense. Amongst the civil caste, there are guilds, which are essentially sub-castes. They include our clergy, our artists, our scientists, our administrators and civil servants, our engineers, architects, and builders, our merchants, and many other distinct groups, down to simple manual laborers. As you might expect, the majority of the Autobots are members of this caste. We count amongst our organization representatives from all of the civil guilds as well as a fair number of warriors and one of the surviving royals.
However, the war has and continues to decimate not only our home planet but also, now that we lack a queen, our population. Three of the four stasis chambers where sparks had been stored on Cybertron have been completely destroyed over the course of the war to date, the sparks that had been housed within them extinguished. The fourth chamber is functional but heavily damaged. Tens of thousands of lives, enough to perpetuate our species for perhaps millions of years, were lost before they had had a chance to live; now, they cannot be replaced.
When we Autobots left Cybertron, the remaining chamber had housed only seventy-seven viable sparks. At the time, we knew that it was possible that we would never be able to return to or have future contact with Cybertron, so we took forty of those sparks with us when we left our home, all that our ship could safely support long-term in stasis. In the event that we ended up settling on another world, it was thought that this would give those sparks, at least, a chance to survive and live their lives. It is partly for this reason that our ship, which has now become our headquarters, has come be known as the Ark, so christened by human associates of ours, a reference to an ancient religious text. Having now read the text in question, I agree that the reference is quite apt.
Thirty-two of the sparks we took with us survived our unexpected crash on Earth and the subsequent period of hibernation, but none of them survived completely intact and undamaged. Still, our chief engineer and our chief medic were recently able to utilize five of those damaged sparks as a "base" in order to create the newest members of our species: The Dinobots. We have hope that the procedures used to bring them to life can be revised and improved so that the other twenty-seven damaged sparks currently remaining in protective stasis, can be salvaged as well. Because as it is, in the wake of the ruin of our society and given our lack of a queen with no possibility of replacing her, most of us are simply inclined to accept that our species is doomed…