Hopefully I’m preaching to the choir and the main response from everybody is that this is obvious and didn’t need to be said.
I read a few comments from some gross cishets about how angry they are about the female Custode. They prop up the Imperium of Man as though they are some paragon of morality and not the picture of everything wrong with imperialism. Naturally this perfectly moral force would have only men in its ranks, clearly! They don’t seem to realize that if women are left out we have a sexist/mysogynist system which is not worth praising, and if they include women then it’s the imperialist machine trying to keep up appearances. Frankly, I’ve always figured the Imperium didn’t care about gender or race because everyone is suitable to die in combat and be ground into food for the starving populace.
tl;dr Men are upset that women exist and missed the whole satire
The only thing cheap in The Imperium is life. The bottleneck on the number of guardsmen is space on the transport ships, not recruitment capacity - they would absolutely march every single man, woman, and child from every single hive world straight into their enemies if they could.
A sixteen year old conscript stolen from a world that hadn’t seen an imperial ship in five generation, clutching a lasgun that is over three millenia old and has taken countless lives.