User:SOTO/Forum Archive/The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-1451563-20180917104120

Hello again, everyone! Apologies for disappearing like that for so long; I was not seeing notifications for this thread. But thank you for discussing the issue with such interest and thoughtfulness while I was gone, anyway. Now it looks like I have a lot to catch up with, so allow me to address all of what could still use addressing. Prepare for a gigantic post...

Could you please provide an in-universe confirmation that changing gender during a regeneration is an anomaly for Time Lords? I'm not sure I can remember anything of the sort. I believe I laid out the case fairly completely in the original post. The only examples we have of any cross-sex regenerations in the show are, by definition, anomalous; like I explained, the Doctor, the Master, and the General were all one sex for each and every one of their incarnations except for one time each. And, as Scrooge MacDuck pointed out, while the Corsair (entirely forgot to mention him, so thanks, Scrooge) did deviate from his usual sex more than once, it was still only a few times. So the anomaly is there.

But in addition to that, since those are our only examples of such a regeneration occurring that we have to go by, we are left only to assume that it is a pretty rare occurrence for other Time Lords, as well. And that is backed up by the argument that could be made that if such an occurrence was too commonplace it would destabilize Time Lord society and the fact that, if it were truly just a 50/50 chance every time, the Doctor, Master, and General could not have all beaten such odds with every single one of their regenerations except once each as they have. As depicted in the show with every Time Lord we have seen, there is an observable tendency to regenerate into the same sex each time. But anyway, that's kind of just a tangent.

All I can see so far from the example(s) provided is that one or two Time Lords considered a particular gender to be normal for them. Given the total number of Time Lords (one can guesstimate it from the number of children on Gallifrey at the moment of the end of the Time War, which was in the billions), there is, statistically speaking, almost no information about their views on gender change. The percentage of Time Lords who voiced their opinion on the subject is (almost) 0.

Of course, if the Doctor (or another Time Lord) said something about all Time Lords rather than him/herself, that would be in-universe evidence. My question is whether any such general statement exists? So far I've only seen subjective statements about individual preferences. A reason to generalise from one General to all Time Lords is lacking. Okay, except using any of these pronouns requires some level of assumption, and my argument is that the only thing the show allows us to assume is that there is a gender norm – at least in the case of these 4 Time Lords, if not all of them. Instead, what this Wiki is doing is assuming that the Time Lords are to be referred to as "they" when not referring to a specific incarnation, in direct contradiction with all of what has been done in the show itself. THAT is something that should require evidence to argue doing, not simply sticking with the method that the show has set for us by using "he" or "she" instead.

When the only views we have on the issue all agree on one mode of thought, that is the only thing we can assume as true for the Time Lords as a whole, not the entirely out-of-universe concept of using "they." And keep in mind that it is not only those individual Time Lords' views on themselves that the show has presented us, but also other Time Lords views on them, as is the case with the Doctor's referring to the Master and the Corsair as generally male.

But even if we were to say okay about using "they" for all of the instances in which it is unknown what the individual Time Lord's views on the issue were, what this Wiki is currently doing does not follow that line thinking. If that were to be the policy, we should then be calling every Time Lord (as I mentioned earlier) except for the Doctor, Master, General, and Corsair "they," and referring to those 4 as "he," "he," "she," and "he," respectively, since we know from in-show dialogue what their "general pronouns" are. And if this hypothetical policy were to be taken to its logical conclusion, we would also have to refer to every single character of every species as "they," since we do not know who might have a different sense of gender or a different belief about their identity or an ability to change sex. But of course that would be ridiculous and extreme. Instead what we do is start from a sensible default that we logically must assume until proven otherwise, in which case we adjust for the exception. So all I'm suggesting is to keep doing that, since an inconsistency has arisen.

Instead of repeating what I said before in another way, let me bring something new to the table. Specifically, a quote: [...] Ah yes, this infamous quote, haha. Now that is not a valid piece of evidence that we can actually use to argue anything, really, and let me tell you why: it is played off by the show itself.

First, let's take a look at the full dialogue itself: Doctor: I think she [the Master] was a man back then. I’m fairly sure that I was, too – it was a long time ago, though.

Bill: So... Time Lords... A bit flexible on the whole, like, man/woman thing, then, yeah?

Doctor: We’re the most civilized civilization in the universe. We’re billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.

Bill: But you still call yourselves Time ‘Lords.’

Doctor: ...Yeah, shut up.

Bill: [chuckles] Okay. See? It’s immediately shut down as something not to be taken too seriously by Bill’s pointing that fact out and leaving the Doctor with no comeback after.

And beyond that, it is also contradicted by other examples throughout the show. For example, there was the time the General regenerated and asked how men could possibly cope "with all that ego," the time the Saxon Master said this: [when Missy calls Cyber-Bill "her"] "HER? It’s a Cyberman now. [...] Becoming a woman is one thing, but have you got empathy?" [and when Cyber-Bill tells them to stand aside and the Doctor says, "Do as she says"] "'Do as SHE says' - is the future gonna be ALL girl?" And this is all said with nothing but disgust in his voice, which fits with other sexist attitudes he had expressed before with such comments as "Killed by an insect! A girl ...How inappropriate!" Then there's also the Eleventh Doctor's sneaky laugh at Clara when he claimed he wasn’t shutting the TARDIS down to basic mode just because she was a girl. Oh, and I have unfortunately not seen Twice Upon a Time yet, but I have heard that they portray the First Doctor as rather "old-fashioned" and sexist. All of those instances prove that Time Lords are not, in fact, all beyond gendered thinking or stereotypes.

But either way, the way I've always took that conversation between the Twelfth Doctor and Bill to mean would not support using "they" to refer to Time Lords generally, anyway. The Doctor says they were beyond "gender and its associated stereotypes," clearly referring to "gender" as in the social/cultural/stereotypical idea, as opposed to the biological sex. Yet he is referring to the Master still as "he/she," so that would not mean Time Lords call each other "they" because they do not have gender, because that is shown not to be the case in the very conversation itself. Instead, it seems to be saying that Time Lords do not care about this imaginary idea of "gender" like human culture is so caught up in arguing about right now, instead only basing pronouns on biological sex. That is the only basis left at that point for whether to call a Time Lord a "he" or a "she," if we are to take that conversation seriously at all, but that does not really help us with this specific discussion we are currently having in any way, so that's irrelevant. But at any rate, it does not support a "they" usage.

Ok, as long as this thread does not establish some deep conclusions about an alleged baseline gender in Time Lord society, let us discuss the pronoun.

First of all, there is, in my mind, zero problem referring to a specific incarnation by the gender of that incarnation. No reason to abandon doing that. The case of referring to several incarnations of the same gender is more subtle, but the simplest solution is, again, to use the common gender pronoun, given that it was the same person after all. Glad we're all in agreement here.

The real question, for me, is referring to multiple incarnations of both genders. Note that this is not at all that common an occurrence. For instance, if Missy is talking about her lifelong feelings or interests, I would still consider the female pronoun appropriate. If Missy talks about herself, as you say, she is probably referring to herself as a she. So really I can only see a problem when a third person refers to an absent Time Lord who changed gender or when the reference specifically addresses multiple-gender incarnations. Except, seeing as I keep finding "they" all over the place, it is evidently fairly common :P

Unfortunately, given Tardis:Neutral point of view, much of what is written about the Doctor etc. must be written from the 3rd-person perspective (omniscient narrator) and from the point of view of the end of the universe. So no connection to a particular incarnation is possible. The neutrality and the randomness of the in-universe pronoun use, pointed out before, seemingly leave no choice other than a gender-neutral pronoun. No other choice would be neutral. But that's simply not the case. The specificity and consistency of the in-universe pronoun use, as laid out in-depth by Scrooge, leave no choice other than using the pronoun most applicable to the predominant number of the Time Lord's sexes. That is how the show treats the issue, so the way I see it is that it would be an arbitrary and presumptuous act of reading our own independent, external interpretations/feelings/views into the material to do otherwise.

Finally, I would like to point out that "they" is not the cause of problems with clarity. One has exactly the same mess when five male characters have a scene together, making any attempt at using "he" problematic.

After all, we only have four types of personal pronouns. Thus, by the pigeonhole principle, whenever five characters are discussed, at least two of them are going to be pronoun-confusable. Whatever is decided in this thread, good editing was, is and will remain the only solution to unclear prose. Except that is surely an extraordinarily rarer case than whenever there would otherwise be a single use of "they" in a sentence if it weren't for this inherently confusing system we've put into place, lol. There are common methods and standards to English that can help prevent unclarity when referring to multiple "he"'s, but there has never been a common need to do the same for "they"'s, so introducing that word's use in this way also introduces and multiplies the number of cases in which prose will no longer be clear and will require creative reorganizing.

And using "they" in this manner is, once again, not grammatically correct to begin with, so the means of solving those cases of unclarity will require even more creativity and potentially awkward phrasing than would ever be needed for the standard "he" situations, since the English language does not provide for such shenanigans. And that brings up another issue I have addressed that no one else has really responded to: this is not proper grammar, so why is it even an option to begin with? From an English perspective, we shouldn't even be having this discussion in the first place.

Anyway, sorry for the monstrous wall of text, lol.