Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-44988386-20200416234118/@comment-6032121-20200527003550

@NeverForget: I feel as though we could very well get away with having different standards for sexual/romantic orientations, and for gender identities.

@DiSoRiEnTD1: For very good reasons, the Timeless Child isn't conclusive evidence at all. But also, while arguably the Doctor might have been born female, if we're talking about the Thirteenth Doctor as a distinct entity with her own page, wasn't she "born" (out of the Twelfth Doctor's ashes) in a female body? …Also, another issue with your reasoning is that even if we buy that the Timeless Child wasn't just a lie cooked up by, andeven if we disregard the other conflicting origins which are equally valid… we don't know the Child found by Tecteun underneath the gateway had been born this way. Her regeneration after falling off the cliff is "the first regeneration of any person on the planet of Gallifrey", but it's not necessarily the Child's first regeneration in general.

…Also, I just noticed something very interesting to boot: the first Child might be played by a female child actor, but are we even sure what pronoun they used? Looking at the Master's dialogue again over the scenes of the “first Timeless Child”, it seems like Chibnall very pointedly avoids any gendered pronouns. Maybe the first Timeless Child went by they/them, or he/him, or something else entirely — why should our standards for "these clothes and features denote a girl" apply to this utterly alien being who is speculated have been thrown through from another universe?