Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-1451563-20181209095042

Well, I rewrote it. Not as elegant as it was the first time, but I think I remembered everything I needed to address...

Sure the Doctor has said individuals of other species wouldn’t understand him before, but this is the first time to my knowledge that she has said anything of the sort regarding Time Lord gender specifically. So it’s important to me to figure out in what way exactly she means the Time Lord concept of “man or woman” differs from human/loba gender in the “way” a human-built drone would understand it, as I don’t think it’s necessarily as clear and definitive as we’re assuming. There are very different and equally possible interpretations for what that “way” could be when just reading that quote in isolation with no other context.

For instance, my first assumption would be that it might supposed to be clearly referring to the fact that Time Lords can spontaneously change sex with regeneration, meaning they could be both male and female at many different times throughout their lives. That of course differs from humans, as they are not basically just stuck with one sex from birth to death as we are, necessarily. But that only addresses the physical change and is thus not anything we don’t already know about, so that doesn’t help us any more in determining pronouns or anything.

Another thought would be that, since she asks the drone to scan her again, if she actually expects it to be able to detect something about that through a second scan, the “way” she differs from how the drone would understand “man or woman” must be referring to an actual, anatomical difference. But that would be more of a species thing than a sexual thing (two hearts and such), so in that case the “man or woman in the way you understand it” comment would actually have to be an extension of her differentiating herself from the humans and the lobas, just elaborating on how she is in fact neither, but an entirely different thing, a Time Lord - the “man or woman” bit specifically being worth bringing up only because that is evidently the only thing the drone was scanning for, as opposed to seeing whether she was even human/loba at all to begin with. But once again, that wouldn’t tell us any more information than what we have already known and so couldn’t help us in determining pronouns.

The other possibility is that the “man or woman” part of the quote is just more of a corrective aside not directly related to the explanation that she is not human/loba or to her request for another scan. In this case only could we attempt to derive information on using different pronouns from.

So do you see my issue with the quote yet?

Also, it seems you are operating under the understanding that there are plenty of quotes that support the “they” usage but that we’re only not sure because they might be jokes or might not apply universally, but I disagree. I assume you must be referring to the Fifth Doctor quote about gender being a fluid concept and the Twelfth Doctor quote about Time Lords being beyond gender and its stereotypes. Well, as for the Fifth Doctor quote, once again I must say that while of course Time Lords seem to be “gender fluid,” in a manner of speaking, in that their regenerations can literally make them change sex, they obviously do not exactly fit with the situation of those who believe themselves to be “non-gender-binary” in human terms. So, since none of the Time Lords we are discussing have ever identified as genderqueer in any way (though perhaps this new Thirteenth Doctor quote will be argued to change that in some way) and since, if they hypothetically were to, it still would not automatically mean they should be referred to individually as “they,” since some genderqueer individuals prefer to be called “he,” “she,” “ze,” etc., that quote does not support the “they” usage period.

As for the Twelfth Doctor quote, once again, that has been thoroughly refuted both by the scene itself’s being written to “debunk” itself, as well as the countless instances throughout the show supporting the invalidity of that scene through consistently and blatantly showing many Time Lords expressing all kinds of gendered thinking and stereotypes. The Doctor there is written to be an unreliable narrator there in a situation played for laughs.

And another issue I’m noticing is that we all seem to be failing to address the fact that the show has already established a pronoun system for how to refer to these Time Lords by its own dialogue that we are completely ignoring. There has to my knowledge yet to be anyone to disprove this system in order to even merit forming our own using “they” to begin with. Remember the Corsair being a he expect when he’s a she and the General considering being female back to normal and the Master always being the Master except when she’s the Mistress (which is also how this Wiki even treats the gendered name switch)? All of these examples and more are still just sitting there, contradicting the “they” idea and not being examined…

And for future note, though I have still not seen series 11, I have heard there has been a few gender mixups and things of that sort from the Doctor, so I will be interested in discussing the implications of those once I see what they are and their contexts, and also if we eventually do end up determining “they” is the best English descriptor for this alien species in light of this new quote, we must not neglect to address the real issues of how to deal with the Master’s names and the fact that that will mean ALL Time Lords should be “they.”