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

Disclaimer: Forgive me if any of the topics discussed here may be deemed offensive. I do not intend to make light of any issues that may affect some people in real life. This is purely a discussion about the use of pronouns as they apply to specific fictional characters, so let’s please not get too political about this issue.

So I was reading some articles, and I’ve noticed a few of them have starting referring to the Doctor and other Time Lords that have had cross-sex regenerations as “they/their/them.” What’s the deal with that? It’s even being used to refer to events that have a defined gender, when he was only male, like on the “Barn (The Day of the Doctor)” page, when it says “they” visited the barn in four incarnations, but each of those incarnations was male, so I have since changed it to male pronouns.

One major problem with doing this is that the grammar is honestly pretty painful. I began reading the Doctor's page, and I took particular notice of the third paragraph. It is as follows: "For their actions, the Time Lords granted the Doctor a new regeneration cycle, allowing them to live on after using up all available regenerations in their first cycle." That usage is so ambiguous. By the rules of the English language, "their actions" would have to be referring to the Time Lords, yet we're honestly expecting regular people to be able to immediately understand what the heck that is referring to? It's just so needlessly over-complicating things with this method of pronoun use for Time Lords.

That does, however, seem to be an instance in which I could fairly change all those pronouns to male, anyway, since those events are all specifically referring to things that happened to male Doctors, just as with the Barn article. But my point was to bring that excellent example up because I'm sure there are plenty of other cases like that that might supposed to be referring to the Doctor in a more general way, too, but are instead just confusing. And this becomes even more of an issue if you want have consistency, because then all Time Lords - even the ones that we have only known to be one sex - must be referred to as “they” always, as well.

Regardless, the Doctor is a male Time Lord. He just happens to have one female regeneration. It has been established in the show that there is a norm when it comes to sex with each Time Lord’s regenerations, but very occasionally one will swap sexes as an anomaly. The Doctor = male at birth + 12 or 13 male regenerations + 1 female. The Master, too, has always been male except for one time, when he became Missy. And then there’s the General, who establishes that she had always been female except for that one incarnation and that she was “back to normal” after that when she became female again. So, considering “they” is grammatically incorrect, anyway, it seems to make more sense to go with what the show itself already suggests: stick to using the pronouns that are appropriate to each specific incarnation, but not forgetting on a whole that just as the General is a female Time Lord with one anomalous male regeneration, the Doctor is so far a male Time Lord with one anomalous female regeneration. Meaning it is appropriate to refer to each in a broader sense as “she” and “he,” respectively. And until a much greater percentage of the Doctor’s regenerations are female, it seems unnecessary to confuse things by sticking the “they” in there, too, ESPECIALLY and AT LEAST when referring to incarnations that were indisputably male, as with my example from the Barn article.

I completely understand where those who advocate for the “they” pronouns are coming from, but that’s not how the show itself seems to treat the issue, and shouldn’t that be the #1 guideline to go by? The show establishes a gender norm, with the exceptions being just that - exceptions. So naturally, the Doctor would be a “he” (except for when he is a “she”).

The whole cannot be defined by its anomalous exceptions. So why aren’t we referring to these Time Lords just with their standard pronouns except for in the special cases in which those no longer apply, instead of just needlessly covering it all with the awkward “they”?