See the Fangrrl Squee

I wake up with the strangest ideas, sometimes.

This is somewhat related to a post I made a while ago, hypothesizin' about Time Lord sexual mores. So, I suppose this is a follow-up, of sorts.

If you accept the whole "genetic loom" thing¹, would this mean that the gender of the parents is irrelevant?

For that matter, why limit the parental contributions of genetic material to two people? Why not one? Why not three? I know, that's straying close to some of the sillier bits of Heinlein's Future History, but it's one of those thoughts that crosses one's mind.

For that matter, is gender even relevant to Time Lords?

I know that, in the post mentioned above, I made a bit of a palaver about Time Lords needing certain glands (ahem) if they don't want to be physical children for the entire duration of their existence, but my husband just made an interesting point as he peered over my shoulder at the LJ (and shook his head a bit ruefully, I might add). When Romana II was choosing her new body, one of the discarded choices was apparently male. Yes, yes, one could do a bit of handwaving and suggest that a form that is apparently male to one person is apparently something else entirely to another, but that could be considered a copout.

Never mind the implications for non-traditional-by-my-paltry-standards-styles-of-parenting, I think the gender question is rather interesting. Granted, I'm looking at it from my own POV. When you have a few transgendered friends, you can't help speculating along certain lines. Not to be dismissive of what's a very important issue to many folks, but I wonder what the Time Lord take would be on gender. Is it a social construct? Does the concept even exist?

I suppose the concept of gender could be a carryover from the pre-cursed-to-sterility days (fair point) but Time Lords have been reliant on the Looms for how long? Given how quickly social customs come and go in Western society - some more quickly than others - why should we believe that the concept of gender would linger overlong on Gallifrey?

There's a fic idea in this somewhere, I know there is...

PS. Meanwhile, an obvious upside to a dependency on the looms: I rather doubt there's such a thing as an unwanted child or unplanned pregnancy in that society.

¹ - Time Lords don't reproduce in what we'd consider the usual fashion but are apparently created via genetic manipulation - although there's no word on if a fetus has to be carried by a host mother, or is grown in a bottle and decanted, Brave-New-World style...