Okay so I gather that you really like Missy, how do you feel about how the gender change was handled?
Fantastic.
The Mistress completely owns her appearance. She delights in being a woman. Being suddenly female isn’t a source of shame or discomfort or even awkwardness for her, it’s an opportunity to completely rock a new style and have a whole lot of fun with it.
Missy presents as female, dresses in girly-girl women’s clothes, insists on being adressed as a Time Lady and having a lady’s name. She enjoys make-up, cute bracelets, pretty nailpolish, she’s even mounted her TCE on the end of the world’s cutest little umbrella. She freely uses a sweet little diminutive for her own name. She loves tea parties and dancing and she’s so completely bouncy and hilarious and confident and in charge.
And let me tell you — I have never in my life seen a story in which that has happened in any other fandom. Every transformation story or body-switch story I’ve come across so far (and that’s quite a lot, it’s something I definitely have A Thing for) has this obligatory plot point where the newly female character feels all fragile and weak and uncomfortable with their new body. (Obviously — a person’s gender and sex mismatching is hardly fun in real life, and it’s good when it’s represented as realistically uncomfortable in fiction.) But Time Lords and Time Ladies are from a race where transformations are biologically built-in and where their gender, if any, can switch right along with their sex. They can feel perfectly happy about a transformation of this kind — allowing for a revolutionary way of storytelling in which a previously male character is now female and completely fine with it. You know what that is? It’s downright inspiring, it’s intensely empowering. To see someone become female and not feel like it in any way diminishes their character. To see someone having a female body and, despite the current discourse in fiction, feeling one hundred per cent comfortable in their own new skin.
This, this sort of thing, is exactly what science-fiction is for. To present situations that are impossible in real life, and to show them as something inspiring. Now, I’m not saying the Mistress is a good role model — I mean, she’s an evil megalomaniac and all — but do I love the way she’s written? Hell yes. I love it more than I can possible put into words.