User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-5918438-20181003043406

It's actually real simple. It's incorrect to say the Doctor in general is a "male Time Lord", and generic "he" is not a thing. You cannot describe the Doctor, in general, with he/him pronouns. Some of their incarnations use he/him pronouns, and at least one incarnation so far uses she/her.

"He or she" is just generic "he", with "or she" added as an afterthought. And it does not describe the nuances of gender, anyhow.

It has been established in the DWU that Time Lords do not think of gender in the restrictive sense that most modern humans do. Being different genders in different incarnations is not at all seen as an anomaly; in that rooftop scene, recently, Twelve can't even recall if the Master was a man at the time they first knew each other.

I'm loving that Fifth Doctor quote Amorkuz found. In human terms, all Time Lords are effectively genderfluid. Many aspects of a Time Lord's personal identity change with regeneration, and that's just one of them. Not all Time Lords stay middle-aged white men throughout their regenerations; that's just what we saw in classic Who for real world reasons. This can no longer be considered the norm.

There's not much to discuss here. Singular they/them are simply the correct pronouns to use here, as they're the gender-neutral personal pronouns we have been blessed with in the English language. And as Nate brought up, Titan Comics has picked up on this, and is using singular they for the Doctor too.

So they/them for the Doctor in general, he/him or she/her for specific incarnations, and he/him is good when discussing only male Doctors, too.

The real objection here is about best phrasing. "The Fifth Doctor and Adric returned to the TARDIS because he had a cold." That sentence does not work, because we don't know who "he" is. Because singular they and plural they appear quite similar without context (much like singular/plural you), we will encounter sentences where further specificity would be most helpful.

So if it's not clear in the sentence if "they" is the Doctor or the Daleks, you make sure to swap out the pronoun for a regular old noun, or a noun group. "The Doctor hated the Daleks, because they always escaped their grasp" could always become "because they always escaped the Time Lord's grasp".

This is the same issue as with the Doctor and Adric. "Because Adric had a cold".