Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1451563-20180913002703/@comment-6032121-20180914091935

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?

I could not agree more. On top of the fact you raise that Time Lords seem to have one default gender (the one they have at birth) and then the occasional nonstandard regeneration, this seems to be the damning bit of evidence.

Whenever the Doctor refers to Time Lords who have changed genders, and I mean refers to them in general, across regenerations, he goes back and forth between "he" and "she", favoring what seems to be the "default" gender. When talking about the Corsair:

The Corsair, fantastic bloke! (…) Didn't feel like himself unless he had the tattoo… or herself, a couple of times — woo-hoo, she was bad girl!--

he generally talks about the Corsair with male pronouns, then switches to "she" and "her" when specifically talking about the Corsair's two or three female incarnations.

And when discussing the Master/Missy in that infamous scene in World Enough for Time —

She was my first friend, always so brilliant… since the first day at the Academy… so fast, so funny! She was my man-crush.

We had a pact, me and him — every star in the universe, we were going to see them all. But he was too busy burning them… I don't think she ever saw anything.

when referring to the Master's young self at the Academy, and then to his later, "star-burning" incarnations, all of whom were male, the Doctor uses "he"; yet even inside of a single sentence, when he's talking about the Master today, as Missy, he switches to "she". ("He"" was too busy burning them… I don't think she'' ever really saw anything": the Master across his past, globally-male selves was busy burning stars; the current, female Mistress hasn't seen anything yet as it stands).

So yeah. Greatly support this proposal. Referring to the Doctor, the Master, the General or the Corsair as "they" is simply not a good idea, especially not when older sources (now disregarded by the main TV series, but valid as far as Tardis Data Core’s concerned) went even further with the "Time Lords have a baseline gender" idea and stated they could only regenerate to change gender in extraordinary circumstances such as suicide. (EDIT: I'm informed this was only ever in an Unbound story. The wider point still stands, though.)