1. &quot;a source close to the filmmakers has told the Daily Mail that BB-8 is definitely &#x27;a she&#x27;&quot; is not really what I&#x27;d call reliable.<p>Furthermore, in the actual film (which was released after this article was published), BB-8 is only referred to as &quot;he&quot;&#x2F;&quot;him&quot;. The anonymous informant claims, &quot;JJ was determined to make BB-8 cute and strong – and female.&quot; But Daisy Ridley is quoted by <i>Time</i> as saying, &quot;I remember J.J. saying, &#x27;He&#x27;s not a child.&#x27;&quot; Abrams is quoted as telling <i>Entertainment Weekly</i>, &quot;I named him BB-8  because it was almost onomatopoeia. It was sort of how he looked to me, with the 8, obviously, and then the two B&#x27;s.&quot; There&#x27;s a video of Abrams answering the question just before the film&#x27;s release at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;collider.com&#x2F;bb8-boy-girl-gender-star-wars-7-the-force-awakens&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;collider.com&#x2F;bb8-boy-girl-gender-star-wars-7-the-forc...</a> with, &quot;I always referred to him as &#x27;he&#x27;, but that&#x27;s just sort of a, you know, I haven&#x27;t checked. I haven&#x27;t looked under the hood.&quot;<p>So I doubt the leaker&#x27;s claim that Abrams was &quot;determined to make BB-8 female&quot;.<p>2. A female robot is <i>just a tiny bit</i> different from a female human. But it&#x27;s not even that: it&#x27;s a gender-ambiguous robot, whose femininity consists of solely a pronoun used by one executive and an anonymous source, and could have easily been male. That seems to be a serious cop-out. You might as well say that the Millennium Falcon satisfies the request for female toys (the ship is regularly referred to as &quot;she&quot; in the original trilogy).