gamepopper101 said:
CrystalShadow said:
Right, people keep repeating this as some kind of truism, yet it means nothing in that sense.
Perhaps being transsexual myself gives me an unusual perspective on this matter, but consider this:
How does the existence of Male (time Lords), and female (time Ladies) prove anything in this instance?
All this tells us is that at any given moment the species (Whatever you want to call it) has at least 2 genders.
However, since regeneration causes significant physical changes, there's every possibility that it could cause a sex change as well.
Would this mess up the time lord/lady bit?
Not really. Just because the same person can change from being male to female, or vice-versa, doesn't change the fact that you have both.
So evidence of having two sexes doesn't prove one way or the other whether regeneration can cause a sex change or not.
(after all, if you see a time lord and a time lady together, you can't infer from that whether either have changed their sex at any point in the past or not.)
I'm only going on the theory that gender wouldn't be effected by a permanent regeneration because it's heavily encoded into the DNA (since there can be massive differences between male and female), I do admit that it's wrong to say it wouldn't make sense, and there would be counter arguments to what I said but that is my opinion.
Well, I can't argue this for a fictional species, but one thing I do know is that in humans the difference between the sexes is actually quite small.
We have all the same major organs, and a huge number of changes that are the result of hormone changes during puberty rather than earlier in life.
(This goes so far that if you were to mess with the hormones of a person at about the age of 10, and disrupt their normal adolescent development, you can almost reverse what they'll resemble as an adult. - Transsexuals as a whole tend to look a little odd because usually they've essentially gone through puberty twice, and some consequences of the first time through aren't reversible; You're not going to suddenly get shorter again for instance.)
Really, the only complex differences between males and females in humans are the genitals themselves. (a male has no organ in their body equivalent to a uterus. However, ovaries and testes are in fact minor variations of the same organ.)
Equally, most of the other parts of the genitals are also the same organ that's developed slightly differently.
As to DNA, it is a very serious misconception that men and women have vastly different DNA.
They don't.
The only difference is in fact one chromosome pair.
Humans have 23 pairs that are identical regardless of your sex, and the XX or XY pair.
However, since the whole point of chromosome pairs is that they have identical functions, but originate from different parents, this isn't a lot of difference.
In each pair, the same locations on either chromosome serve the same purpose, but have slightly different ways of doing so. This means that if one version doesn't work very well, there's another on the matching chromosome that takes over.
The XX chromosome pair in women matches this idea, in that both chromosomes are pretty much identical in purpose, so a defect in one can be compensated for by the other.
Men have an XY pair, but the Y chromosome is almost entirely defective, so all the instructions from that pair have to come from the remaining X chromosome. (This is the reason for a lot of diseases that men get far more than women, such as colour blindness.)
The one unique thing that the Y chromosome contains is little more than an on/off switch.
What it does is basically it says: "if this switch is on, take the default body plan for a human, and modify it according to the instructions you already have".
The actual information for creating both male and female is spread throughout the entire genome, and all the Y chromosome does is say: "Use the 'male' variant instead of the default 'female' one.)
(And yes, as far as genetics goes, 'female' appears to be the default option; What results if you don't do anything else to interfere with the development process)
Long story short:
Human genetics shows that men and women have effectively identical DNA containing the instructions needed to create both male AND female body parts; The only real genetic difference is the presence or absence of a simple switch which tells the body which set of instructions to use.
Wether timelords would be any different is a question that can't easily be answered.
