#among other reasons like it was a made up language (circular Gallifreyan) so who knows if it was even ''right''

[sage-nebula]

when I was getting my tattoo on Saturday my artist kept telling me like, "It's okay if you need to tap out, I won't be pissed or think less of you, we can come back to finish in another session," because honestly for this particular tattoo the pain was severe and about halfway through I started involuntarily cringing and squeezing the pillow I was laying on very hard and other such involuntary shows of how much pain I was in. (such as flinching hard when she had to wipe excess ink / blood / plasma away, because good god somehow the damp paper towel felt worse than the needle.)

but each time I refused. "the only way out is through," I said. nearer the end I said, "if you need to tap out though, I understand" because she had to put on a brace for her back because of the angle at which she had to be hunched over to finish the tattoo. but she didn't tap out either.

anyway I saw a meme with Shadow the Hedgehog that was like, "stop DMing me that 'are you ok' shit, obviously I'm not but we move" and my immediate thought was, "me @ my artist during my tattoo session on Saturday."

[just-kept-running]

Time Lord Culture, Language, and Gender

//So I got bored and this is what happened.  Pronouns are a pretty big thing in my life.  I’m non-binary and I use they/them or xe/xir pronouns.  It’s been an uphill battle to get to a point where I’m comfortable with my appearance and even more of one to get people to use the correct pronouns for me.  Even people who mean well.  I’m an anthropology grad student.  I’m in a department full of anthropologists - and when I’m not there, I’m with a whole bunch of ethnomusicologists, who are basically musical anthropologists.  And the very first thing you learn in anthropology is to let go of the rigid boxes society has taught you everything must fit into.  So these are pretty open-minded people.  And it’s still a lot of reminding people and a lot of explaining what non-binary means and how singular they works.

So because I am both non-binary, fascinated by linguistics, and an utter nerd, I got to thinking.  What must Gallifreyan pronouns be like?  And I put this long, rambling thought under a cut so I don’t take up your entire dash.

So you know how the TARDIS translates everything?  And, I mean, supposedly it doesn’t translate Gallifreyan, but hey, you kind of have to assume the Doctor does not actually speak every language ever and at least part of the time he’s probably speaking Gallifreyan.  I cannot see it being otherwise.  I mean, what good is the translation circuit if it doesn’t translate what the Time Lord piloting the TARDIS is saying?  But I digress.

Anyway, I was thinking about this, because I am prone to doing things like that, and I wondered, you know, how do pronouns in Gallifreyan work?  Hear me out on this, though.  So in English, the language of the show, pronouns are relatively gendered.  In English, in terms of pronouns that refer to people, you have he, she, and they.  Now, all of those can actually be singular (and if you want to fight me on this point, you’ll also have to take that up with Merriam-Webster, so have fun with that) but we usually only use he or she if the subject is known.  When talking about an unknown subject, we tend to use they, because we don’t know the subject’s gender.  But there’s an (incorrect) assumption that if the subject is known, then we do know their gender and that they must be either a he or a she.

Not all languages are like this.  Spanish, for instance, is actually more gendered than English.  Pronouns for people in Spanish are el, la, las, and los.  I did include plurals for a reason.  El is he, la is she, las is plural she, los is plural he or just straight plural.  There is no neutral option.  Indefinite subjects like “the secretary” or “the engineer” tend to be gendered based on culturally defined gender roles.  Additionally, there is no truly neutral pronoun like the English they.  The catch-all plural is masculine and there is no neutral singular.  But that’s not all that changes.  Most nouns and adjectives have both masculine and feminine forms.  So you end up changing a lot of things based on the subject’s gender.

I do know there exist languages in which gendered pronouns and word endings really aren’t a thing, but I can’t think of them off the top of my head.  But I do have to wonder, would that not be what Gallifreyan is like?  I mean, as Twelve helpfully points out, “We’re billions of years beyond your petty obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.”

Time Lords (and I do have to wonder if the Lords and Ladies part of that isn’t also English rather than Gallifreyan) can regenerate as any sex.  As such, their gender is a little bit more complex to suss out than a human’s - and we humans are pretty damn complicated.  But basically, it seems to me that all Time Lords are, by human standards, non-binary.  Now, there are ways that they can control their regenerations, so it is possible that they could choose to always be male or always be female, if that’s what felt more right to them.  But it would seem that they just don’t adhere to the same ideas of gender as humans.

Language is a reflection of the culture it comes from.  It’s sort of circular, actually.  Language is a product of its culture, but the culture is heavily impacted by the language it uses.  This is why people get so up in arms about terminology.  Pronouns, for instance.  The English-speaking non-binary community has made a big push for singular they to be more widely accepted as a personal pronoun because it grants us greater visibility and the way people speak is both indicative of and also shapes their world-view.  So if you have a word for a person who is neither a man nor a woman, you’re more likely to accept that such people exist and are valid in their identities.

So Gallifreyan.  Because gender as per human definitions doesn’t seem to be a thing among Time Lords (although not Gallifreyans as a whole if one wants to include groups like the Sisterhood of Karn), it stands to reason that the language would reflect that.  Oddly, I can think of one instance right off that doesn’t support this.  In the episode “Hell Bent,” the Doctor shoots a Gallifreyan general, forcing the general to regenerate.  This prompts a response from one of their subordinates of, “Are you all right, sir? Oh, er, sorry, ma'am.”  The general then remarks, “Oh, back to normal, am I?” 

On the one hand, if the Gallifreyan language does not have different words based on gender, then there would be no reason for the subordinate to correct himself.  On the other hand, the general doesn’t even seem to notice what sex they have ended up as, although they do go on to comment that the last regeneration was the only time they were ever in a man’s body.  Additionally, Missy changes her name after regenerating into a female body and corrects a Dalek who calls her a Time Lord with the now widely known quip, “Time Lady, thank you.  Some of us can afford the upgrade.”

All of that seems to contradict the Doctor’s assertion that Time Lords are billions of years beyond humans’ petty obsession with gender, as he puts it.  And that’s before we even get into the Master’s snide comment about “Is the future going to be all girl?”  I don’t feel like diving down that particular rabbit hole, though, so we’ll just stick to language.  It does seem overwhelmingly clear that Time Lords are, to some extent, aware of gender roles.  But this seems like it would be a distinctly human thing, and most Time Lords frankly haven’t had much contact with humanity.  Probably the most well known human among Time Lords would be Leela, if I had to guess, because she wound up married to a Time Lord and lived on Gallifrey until her death.  Most Time Lords just aren’t terribly concerned with humanity.  The Doctor, the Master, Susan, and Romana seem to be the exceptions, not the norm.

So I think, honestly, that the amount of attention paid by Time Lords to gender is probably less to do with Gallifrey and more to do with the UK.  Because the people behind the show are not Gallifreyan, they are British.  They are not aliens from a distant and advanced civilization of long-lived shape-shifters, they are humans from 20th and 21st century Earth.  They come from a country whose language, government, and society have all been historically very focused on gender.  And that is very obvious in the show.  If you start with “An Unearthly Child” and work your way forward from there, you can see the shifts in culturally ascribed gender roles.  It’s a very long running series, and a lot has changed in 54 years.

Another reason this whole dissonance between language and function doesn’t make sense to me is that historically, at least in Western society, a lot of culturally ascribed gender roles had to do with the idea of women as mothers and men as providers.  Women were supposed to be nurturing and emotional, while men were supposed to be strong and steadfast.  And while we know at this point that this is bullshit, it has shaped a lot of our culture.  However, that wouldn’t be the case on Gallifrey.  Time Lords are sterile, or were at one point, due to a curse placed on them by the Sisterhood of Karn after the Sisterhood was driven out of Gallifrey.  This is why the Great Houses and the looms exist.  There is also a taboo on pregnancy.  In fact, it’s illegal (or was at one time).  I mentioned Leela earlier, and she’s pertinent here again, because the main reason this even comes up is that that restriction was eased for her and her husband because she was not a Time Lord, she was human.  And even if that weren’t the case, the fact that they can change sexes from one regeneration to the next makes such rigid roles extremely impractical from a societal standpoint.  There would be simply no good way to work that.

But Time Lord society does seem to be, at least for the most part, egalitarian.  It appears to be an attempt at an egalitarian society as written by people who come from a society that is strongly patriarchal.  There are a handful of truly egalitarian societies in the world, and it would be very interesting to see what Gallifreyan society would look like written by an author from one of those cultures.  (Not that it’s likely that will ever happen, given they’re all very tiny and mostly very remote.  Not to mention some of them have begun to be influenced by Westernization.)  I would suppose you would get a very different view on what the language and culture would look like.

But back to the topic of language, because that was where I started with this whole thing.  It really does make me wonder exactly how the Gallifreyan language works.  I can only imagine that the use of gendered terminology for and by Time Lords has more to do with the English of the show and less to do with the Gallifreyan of their origins.  It would really be an interesting thing to expand upon further.