How do relationships on Gallifrey work if your mate can be a male or female depending on their regeneration.Does everyone on Gallifrey go both ways.Also if the Doctor gives birth as a woman and then regenerates into a man does that mean he's the childs mother and father.And wouldn't that be really confusing for the kid.Man i thought earth relationships were difficult.They must be hell on Gallifrey.
shareThey've never really gone into how relationships work on Gallifrey but they do seem to be different from how we humans seem to view them.
As for gender swapping, we have animals and plants on earth which do that, such as wrasses, and they seem to get along with each other well enough.
Yea but i'm not debating the possibility that gender swapping can genetically happen.I just don't understand how it can work in a society with sentient intelligent beings.I mean when you really stop to think about it how can long term sexual relationships work unless it's a society of bi-sexuals.And the whole kid thing.On any given day your mother could become your father and your father could become your mother.I understand in todays world gender doesn't matter.But you try explaining that to a kid who walks in looking for their mother and instead find some guy.The more i think about it the more convaluted and ridiculous it sounds.
shareWell, technically the kid's father would always be the one who impregnated the kid's mother - whichever gender they end up being later, as best we know anyways.
The real problem would be that if the father time traveled to a point when he was a she (Or the other way around) and then had sex with themselves making the kid have both parents being the same person.
And as the progenation machine, from The Doctor's Daughter, shows us Time Lords may just clone themselves and be free of sexual reproduction altogether.
I wouldn't worry about it too much, it's just a fun show with no basis in reality (That we know of!).
We have no idea how reproduction works on Gallifrey, and I hope it's never explained in detail. The Doctor had a granddaughter and mentioned being a father once, in a distant and regretful way, that's about all we've got.
We have no idea how long-term relationships work either, but I suspect they don't have marriages. I mean humans have trouble keeping marriages going for even a few decades, even with sex and breeding to give them something in common, how could a species that has life spans somewhere between centuries-long and immortal maintain a pair bond when they have the potential to turn into different people with different personalities and different ages and occasionally even a different sex? I suppose that some people could love each other enough to stay together whether their partner is an old man or a little girl at the moment, but I would imagine that's unusual. Still, Missy seems to feel that way, the Doctor... less so.