User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-38106373-20190109081443

After reading through most of this, and the original thread, I still don't get why we would use "they" for refering to an individual. The in-universe mechanics of Time Lords changing gender are completely irrelevant to this discussion, the point is that any text that uses "they" (plural) to refer to a single person/object/thing/etc (singular) becomes completely unreadable.

I understand the issue with refering to for example the Doctor (general) as "he" or "she" since there both male/female incarnations of the Doctor. But there are solutions to this issue that don't break the text. Simplest would be to just use "he/she" but that does look a bit funky. Other option would be to just pick the prevalent gender (12/13 male > 1/13 female = he). Or the first incarnation's gender (if known). I could probably think of more alternatives, but randomly switching to plural is not the way to go if you want the text to make sense.