Okay, so back when the IDW Transformers comics were starting out, they had Simon Furman write out the spotlight issue that would introduce Arcee in this run. Simon Furman's very much in the "They're ROBOTS, why should there be GIRLS?" camp and kind of a dick in general, and he wrote it so that Arcee was basically a guy robot that had been given an incredibly traumatic, unwilling sex change. Who was hellbent on killing the mad scientist who did it in the first place. And honestly a really awesome character.
People lost their goddamn minds. They said this was offensive to women and trans people, even though the whole root of the problem was that this character had been assigned a gender he didn't identify with and hated every second of it. Furman got booted, other writers introduced Actual Certifiable Girl Transformers, we got some gay robots and later on, some robots who were trans just because, no mad science fuckery involved. Everyone wrote around Arcee's backstory for years, even as he got to be really prominent in the comics; kind of alluding to the trauma of it now and then, but never talking about it directly. Like a weird shower mushroom nobody wanted to clean.
That wasn't enough for some people, who loudly insisted that Arcee was totally A STRONG TRANS WOMAN, and had either been that way all along or only recognized it after being tied down and robo-castrated, and that this was 100% CANON.
It wasn't until we were about a decade into the comic that the current guy writing it gave in and started giving Arcee lines like "I'm what I was always meant to be" and "I was a lie I told myself." For the very last issue in the series, he consulted with some purple haired trans lady on twitter who calls herself "Arcee's guardian angel", and together, they gave us a panel or two where Arcee explains that it was consensual and that whole thing where he tortured his doctor was the result of "bad meds."
They also made him a trans lesbian, because tumblr fetishizes trans lesbians like a fat person fetishizes extra ranch.
