#like have any headcanon you want
The evolution of gender systems and power structures on Gallifrey, facts and extrapolation
an essay by me ˆˆ
Once Upon a Time, before the Time Lords came to be, the Shobogan, original habitants of gallifrey and ancestors to the Time Lords, were a matriarchal society, gouverned by what we know now as the sisters of Karn.
From that we can understand gender used to be something important, which contrast with its apparent non importance in recent gallifreyan society. So, what happened?
Tecteun found the timeless child, she experimented on them after finding out that the child could regenerate, she then used the child genes to give this hability to her people too. We also know that the Sisters of Karn were banished from gallifrey to Karn by Rassilion, so we can extrapolate that the two are linked. After Tecteun’s “discovery” she gave herself and others the ability to regenerate, creating the Time Lords. This new “evolved” gallifreyan took over the gouvernement and banned the Sisters to Karn.
From here the matriarchal society was gone, and standard binary gender were soon to follow as the Time Lords were not bound to it anymore. So we could stop her and go “oh gender doesnt exist on gallifrey anymore!” but I’m going to object to that. Why? because the majority of the Time Lords we’ve seen were men, old men even. which from a Doylist POV is explained by the fact that the show was created in a patriarcal society, but it still need an explaination from a Watsonian POV. So my interpretation of it is that when taking over the gouvernment, an oppositionary reaction happened and the Time Lords able to influance their shapes had a tendency to go toward masculine body to show their distanciation from the previous matriarchal system. Why old? because younger body are seen as being made to work, while older bodies mean that they’ve survived long enough to look like that, so that they live in a safe and hight ranked place which didn’t make them face any direct danger. it also signify that they don’t need to do physical work.
Time Lords then became a sort of patriarcal society, the time lords able to controle their shapes and who choose masculine one were being seen as better, above the one who couldn’t or choosed otherwise, and obviously above the Shobogan, since they even went to the point of concidering the 2, 2 different species. Gender didn’t disapeared, it morphed into something else.
So what about transidentity in all of that? why do I keep insisting that the Doctor is nonbinary even by gallifreyan standards? Well something stayed from binary gender and it’s its prescriptivism of the body=mind identity, the equivalent of being cis is to always identify with your apparence, this stayed in their society because it used to be based on binary gender (basically they’re like transmed). The Doctor has always said fuck to this, that’s why they’re nonbinary and trans both for our stardard and gallifreyan ones.
@you-have-to-use-your-imagination talked about how the equivalent of gender for Time Lords is ranks, and their not wrong! it’s what it end up as.
so it went like that:
-Matriarchy (rank is linked to gender)
-pseudo-Patriarchy (rank is still linked to gender)
-switching gender is okay as long as you stay in the essentialist mindset (dissociation of rank from gender)
-rank took over as gender in the power dynamic
the end! (I hope I was clear )
