He's Just A Cosmic Girl..An Analysis Of Gender & Regeneration Within Doctor Who.

We Two Are One.

The revelation that Missy is the Master has caused more than a ripple of anger amongst fans and whilst I don't have any official figures, I would assume that most of the disquiet has come from long time fans that have been watching the show during some period of the preceding fifty years.
Rather than looking at the gender change through an emotional angle, let us examine this change in terms of the impact it has/will have on the dynamics of the show in the future.

Previous DW Controversies.

This isn't the first time that the subject of regeneration has caused controversy. In the 25th Anniversary Special, The Five Doctors, the Master was asked by the High Council Of Gallifrey, and more specifically, Borusa, to go into the Death Zone and help the Doctor. In return for helping the Doctor he was to be given a full Presidential pardon for his past crimes and a whole new regeneration cycle.

Whoa! Back up, a whole new regeneration cycle? How is that possible? It was continually pointed out that Time Lords can only regenerate a maximum of twelve times before they died The 25th Anniversary Special was written by Terrance Dicks who is a previous Doctor Who script editor and writer as well as the author of numerous Target Novelisations of the show.It's very hard to believe that someone who is virtually Who royalty would've forgotten or ignored show canon.

In the Peter Davison story, Mawdryn Undead ,Mawdryn and his accomplices attempted to steal Time Lord technology in order to give themselves a regeneration cycle, instead it gave them one life with a perpetual mutation.

Mawdryn, the would be Time Lord.

In order to end their suffering they required the fith Doctor's life and as he himself pointed out, it would cost him all his remaining regenerations and would effectively finish him as a Time Lord. This is because to aid each of Mawdryn's crew as well as Mawdryn himself would require one of each of the Doctor's regenerations.

In Colin Baker's first story, the universally disparaged, Twin Dillema, the Sixth Doctor meets an old friend and fellow Time Lord, Azmael. Azmael forces himself to regenerate in order to stop a plot by the Gastropods. Peri asks the Doctor if Azmael will regenerate to which the Doctor says no, there are only twelve regenerations and Azmael had used them all.

Then we come to the first appearance of the Derek Jacobi/John Simm Master. At some stage the Anthony Ainley version of the Master may have "died" (he was no longer technically a Time Lord anymore since he now used the power of the Keeper Of Traaken to steal other people's bodies.)
The John Simm tells the Doctor that the Time Lords ressurected him to use as a weapon, presumably in the Time Wars with the Daleks.

DNA Or Consciousness Via The Matrix.

The ideas I'm about to put forward are hypothetical but I believe plausible given what we know about Time Lord technology and medical research.
We know that the Matrix contains the sum total of all Time Lord knowledge. We also know that the Master has been inside the Matrix (as has the Doctor.). It isn't beyond the bounds of possibility that the Master 'deposited' his mind and personality into the Matrix to retrieve later on to place into a new body. This sort of operation wouldn't be beyond limits of Time Lord technology. We also know that a mind/body transference is possible because we have witnessed the 6th Doctor's companion Peri, undergo it in the Trial Of A Time Lord Story, Mindwarp.
In the 10th Doctor Story Human Nature and part two of the same story, Family of Blood, we actually see the Doctor change his physiognomy to that of a human with all of his Time Lord genetic information contained inside a pocket watch. Professor Yana (The Master) also underwent a similar transformation in another story that heralded the arrival of actor John Simm as the Master.
From what has been just revealed we can see that Time Lords can manipulate the physiognomy so changing their gender doesn't seem like a total impossibility at all.

The Romana Regeneration Contraversy.

When the late Mary Tamm (1950-2012) left the show after playing the role of Romana for a year, a new actress was required to take over the role.
Douglas Adams (creator of The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy) was the shows script editor at the time and his sense of humour can clearly be seen in the regeneration scene from Destiny Of The Daleks. It should be pointed out that Mary Tamm had never refused to do a regeneration scene, she simply wasn't asked to do one as she told fans.
In the TARDIS, Romana casually informs the Doctor that she's regenerating. This one scene has caused a great deal of anger amongst fans. The anger was aimed at the way Romana paraded into the control room wearing a variety of regenerated forms including a distinctly alien looking body. Fans decried the casual way threw away bodies like she was trying on dresses. It appeared that Romana had used up (or most of ) her entire regeneration cycle in a few minutes.
It wasn't until many years later when the show had been relaunched that the controversy was finally put to rest.

Lend Us A Hand Guv.

In the Christmas Invasion, a newly regenerated Doctor was undergoing post regeneration trauma and had been asleep/comatose for a prolonged period of time before he was strong enough to deal with the invasion by the Sycorax.
In a scene that would've shocked many fans (myself included), the Sycorax leader chops off the Doctor's hand.

Now we can understand Romana's parade of bodies, because she was still within the first fifteen hours of her regeneration and because she had regeneration energy left she was able to "try" out new bodies until she decided on the one she liked and letting the fifteen hours pass. When she 'chooses' the Princess Astra look body she even tells the Doctor, "The arms are a bit long, still,I can take those in a bit."

Now, while I'm all for answering questions if I possibly can but before I'm bombarded by Whovians asking "Why hasn't the Doctor done this?" let me explain.

In his novelisation of Destiny Of The Daleks, Terrance Dicks mentions how impressed with Romana's level of regeneration control whereas his has always been decidedly haphazard and that tends for me to believe the Doctor has a 'take what you're given' philosophy about his own regenerations.

Regeneration control has been seen and mentioned before. In the 3rd Doctor's final story, Planet Of The Spiders, K'anpo Ripoche, the spiritual leader of a Buddhist retreat, was in fact the Doctor's old mentor and fellow Time Lord. K'anpo's mental powers were so great he could actually leave Gallifrey without the use of a TARDIS. The Monk's assistant, Cho Je, was in fact the physical manifestation of K'anpo's next incarnation.

 The Watcher, A Taste Of Things To Come.

We see something similar in the 4th Doctor's story, Logopolis. The Watcher was the Doctor in transitional form, a figure taken from a brief moment in his time stream. This is the Doctor between the end of his 3rd body and the beginning of his 4th. The Watcher was sent by the Time Lords to talk (?) to the Doctor to inform him of the Master's plans and to let him know it would result in the death of his current form.

Time Will Tell..It Always Does.

With the amount of evidence I've presented here should we be really surprised the Master is now a woman? Perhaps the controversy and subsequent outrage is more a case of having our complacency shaken up. It's quite easy for Whovians to start to feel smug about the show they're passionate about (I myself have been guilty of this.).
What we need to remember is that Doctor Who is arguably the most innovative show on television. We would not be enjoying the show some fifty years later if a bold writer(s) hadn't come up with the concept of regeneration.
Doctor Who has undergone many changes throughout its history, not always for the better but no show, no matter what its genre will survive long without change in some form.
Whether the change from the Master to Missy is accepted by is a matter for the future but what cannot be denied is that the gender change of the show's most despised Time Lord is just another change, one of many that have shaped the show during its long life.

*I would like to gratefully acknowledge Wilkipedia for all the links used in helping me create this blog as well as You Tube and it's talented contributors for all the wonderful videos that helped to explain my theories.