Gender-Swapping Regenerations: Why Now?

Guest contributor Richard Forbes investigates.

Disclaimer: during this article, the author uses “Time Lord” as applying to all sexes; unlike the Master, he is not a traditionalist!

Introduction

In “Dark Water”, audiences witnessed the first “sex-change” of a major Time Lord character, the Master, after (presumably) the process of regeneration. Some have criticised this decision, while other fans and critics have praised the casting of Michelle Gomez and other, more difficult types, have questioned the biology of Time Lord regeneration.

Why, we might ask, has the Master regenerated now as a woman, despite the (assumed) fact that in his previous (seventeen? Fifteen!? Who knows…) regenerations, the Master has always regenerated into a man?

That’s an easy question to answer: the BBC would have received extensive backlash if they had approved such a casting change thirty-forty years ago. Social norms and expectations have changed and with that has come a general acceptance of “gender-swapping” of major fictional characters in film, television and print franchises.

Literalness aside, of course, it is an important question to ask – in terms of the Doctor Who narrative, how should we explain or justify the infrequency of gender-swapping during regeneration? Some episodes have encouraged us to think of regeneration as “random”, but under a truly random sequence it would be highly improbable that a Time Lord would not swap genders during a life-time of regenerations.*

One theory is that regeneration can only involve gender-swapping if the regeneratee wills it as such. That is a strong theory, although it may overestimate how much control a Time Lord has over their regeneration. I have an alternative theory, one based on social and gender inequality…

An Alternate Theory

We know that regeneration is a sensitive process and its outcomes are mired with complications. When a salamander, for example, regenerates and regrows a missing limb, the stem cells help to rebuild a (fairly similar) duplicate of the past limb using the existing DNA present. I reckon that regeneration for Time Lords is much more destructive to the genetic information – amphibian regeneration is to Time Lord regeneration what Xerox machines are to Picasso. Yes, you’ll have working legs and arms (probably) after regenerating, but your jawline might not look the same and don’t even think about retaining your old hair style…

Previously, this quirk of regeneration was always presented to us in a matter-of-fact manner, but I believe that this quirk is an unintended flaw – Time Lords sought to achieve a “perfect” regeneration, but instead they only ever discovered this haphazard process.

On a systemic level, however, there would be practical and ethical concerns with having swathes of the Gallifreyan population regenerating haphazardly into different sexes with new racial features.

Practical Concerns

Identity is often intertwined with appearances. The show’s title, “Doctor Who” is of course, quite ironic because the question of identity is central to a show whose protagonist explodes into a different person every so often. Changing your appearance or your sex or race drastically, however, can be very damaging psychologically.

Gender identity crises, for example, can provoke severe discontent, disgust with one’s self, stress, isolation, anxiety, depression and a lack of self-esteem and confidence. More importantly, if a social environment has stricter gender roles, subjects of regeneration might face more alienation.

Past episodes have suggested that Gallifrey is not a paradigm of social acceptance – if anything, Gallifrey is often portrayed by writers as a caricature of imperialist Britain with a strict economic and social hierarchy. Bearing this in mind: in a world where whether you are a man or a woman or white or black or what-have-you can affect how you are treated by others and how you regard yourself, Gallifrey might have faced a massive public health disaster if it didn’t make an effort to control regenerations and bring some consistency to the process.

Ethical Concerns

The ability to determine the sex of an offspring has posed a problem for contemporary medical ethics. This foreknowledge has given rise to sex-selective abortions and in some cases, infanticide. There is also a very real possibility that technology in the near future could allow parents to create “designer babies” which would allow consumers to choose the sex of their offspring.

I won’t delve into the ethics of sex-selective abortions and such, other than to say that these cases are a problematic collision of modern medicine and age-old social and gender inequalities.

In the case of Time Lord regenerations, however, one would see interstellar medicine paired with Victorian social values – a combination which could prove very disastrous!

Imagine parents on Gallifrey who prompt their own offspring’s regeneration so that they might change their sex, gender, racial features or maybe even their intelligence… all in the hopes of improving their children’s social standing. I find that thought quite unsettling and if anything it demonstrates to me the power of science fiction to reflect on real social issues.

Conclusion

Responding to both practical and ethical concerns, Time Lord scientists would have sought to reduce the likelihood of gender-swapping, racial-swapping and other physical changes in the hopes of improving the consistency of outcomes during regeneration.

This means that Time Lords, while unable to make the process of regeneration wholly “perfect”, would have tried to make regeneration a more consistent process to avoid a public health and social disaster. While regeneration might not get the hairline right, scientists on Gallifrey improved the regeneration process enough that the subjects of regeneration normally retain the right set of chromosomes, maintain similar racial features and otherwise remain in the same arbitrary social categories which facilitated social discrimination on Gallifrey.

However, like airbags or root canals, nothing intended to help us is infallible… sometimes an “X” becomes a “Y”, hence Missy, the Corsair and the Thirteenth Doctor – Oi! A Whovian can dream…

* I figure the likelihood of regenerating as a man over the course of twelve independent regenerations, while equally being likely to regenerate as a man or as a woman is 0.02% or 4096: 1. I encourage enthusiasts to do their own homework on the subject because I am no mathematician!