Well, Neil Gaiman’s episode of Doctor Who appears to have gone down very well with the fan audience, doubtless to the extreme relief of all involved. Personally I didn’t doubt Neil’s knowledge of the series, or his ability to deliver a good story. He did, however, still manage to give me a very pleasant surprise. I missed it the first time through because we couldn’t hear the sound in the Ramada bar, and subtitles were not turned on until after the key lines had been delivered, but I watched it on iPlayer yesterday and was very happy.
Because the Doctor regenerates on a regular basis, female fans have long asked why he couldn’t regenerate as a woman. This has happened in fan fiction, and perhaps most famously in the 1999 Comic Relief spoof episode, “Doctor Who and the Curse of Fatal Death”, which ended with the Doctor regenerating as Joanna Lumley.
However, in 2008 Russell (T.) Davies gave an interview in which he stated that a female Doctor would never happen because (eww!) that would make the Doctor a Tranny, and Trannies are much too yucky and pervy for a kids show.
Well, not in those exact words, of course, but that was the clear message. Significantly Davies noted that a female Doctor would require fathers to explain gender reassignment to their sons. Presumably the idea of a female Doctor becoming male would not worry him, because becoming male is something he thinks all women should aspire to.
Davies, however, is very much part of the 20th Century version of the gay establishment which regards transsexuals as people who are “really” gay but are so ashamed of their gayness that they alter their bodies to allow them to have sex with the people they fancy without seeming gay. The existence of transsexuals who identify as gay after transition, or of the various shades of genderqueer folk, is conveniently forgotten.
These days, thankfully, Doctor Who is open to a more flexible view of gender. The story of “The Doctor’s Wife” begins with our hero receiving a distress message from a fellow Time Lord known as Corsair. The Doctor makes it very clear that this person sometimes reincarnated as male, and sometimes as female. As this was said in an actual TV episode, it is now cannon.
Neil has many close friends who are trans people, several of whom he knows much better than he knows me, so I’m not trying to claim that he did this just for me. It is, however, something that he did not need to do, and must have done as a gift to his friends. For that I am profoundly grateful.
Update: Various Doctor Who experts, including Paul Cornell and Graham Sleight, have tweeted to inform me that Steven Moffat wrote a regeneration scene in which The Doctor wonders whether he will comeback as a woman next time. It apparently occurs at the end of “The End of Time” and is repeated at the start of “The Eleventh Hour”. Thanks are therefore also due to Mr. Moffat, though to some extent he simply establishes the possibility of a female Doctor, whereas Neil makes it clear that Corsair is exuberantly genderqueer.
I am leaving the typo in place as it has caused so much amusement. Genre cannon! BOOM!!!
Would a female Doctor necessarily be a trans character? (Aside from in the most obvious way that she used to be one sex and is now another). I may be on the verge of exposing my ignorance here, but I thought being trans implied a definite internal gender which didn’t match the body they were born into. While the Doctor I’ve always thought is just the Doctor, who’s an alien first and foremost, and has race and gender as pretty much cosmetic additions (Which, admittedly, have so far always been white and male).
Chris:
No worries about asking questions. You might want to read this, which talks about different types of trans people. Certainly a female Doctor would not be a transsexual, but a Time Lord who enjoyed swapping genders, as Neil says Corsair does, is clearly transgender.
You are right about the Doctor being an alien. I have this discussion a lot with people about The Left Hand of Darkness. But the point (both here and in Le Guin’s book) is not the nature of the alien, but the way in which we humans perceive the alien, and what that does to our notions of gender. Davies held that the existence of trans people was too repulsive to be acknowledged on a “family” show. Gaiman and Moffat have overturned that.
(Sigh) Reading “Trans” to only mean “Transexual”- that was a rookie mistake right there. Usually I know better.
I’ve got to admit I’m shocked and disappointed with RTD- Given he brought in the first non-heterosexual companion and canonised the possibility of a non-white Doctor, I’d come to expect better of him.
I think a lot of the anti-feeling towards a Doctor who isn’t a white male, comes from the Doctor being able to walk into any place in any point in history and start ordering people about, which what with history being entirely run by white men (Ancient Egypt? No, sorry, never heard of it) they don’t believe a black female Doctor would be able to do the same. Personally, that’s why I’d love to see a Doctor who isn’t a white male. Having the Doctor walk about like he or she owns the place, and demanding exactly the same respect regardless of the social attitudes of the time, just because *that’s what the Doctor does* would, I think, make some great telly.
I want to ask about how much gender/sex switching in sci-fi actually throws light on trans issues, but the only examples I can think of off the top of my head of It’s A Boy/Girl Thing and Turnabout Intruder, which are pretty objectively terrible before you even start looking at the gender politics.
Transphobia amongst older members of the LG community is fairly common. Look at Julie Bindel, for example.
For discussion of trans issues in SF, see this paper, which I wrote to present at ICFA last year.
Thanks Cheryl, that’s a good read. Of course, reading that unleashed a whole stream of other questions as well, but I really should be getting on with work.
Genre cannon is GREAT! Fire away!!! Let the next Doctor be a woman, for crying out loud!!!
I’d always thought the in-story justification for why the Doctor kept regenerating as a white male was because he liked a particular time and place on Earth that was much easier for him to enjoy as a white male, not because he was biologically locked into it.
(Note: if there has been information to the contrary in the new series, then I didn’t know; I don’t watch the new series. What I’m watching instead right now is sf anime, which is happily having quite the boom in sympathetic non-heteronormative characters right now.)
Petréa: That’s sort of the point I was making above. There’s a great line in The Shakespeare Code:
Martha Jones: Am I alright? I’m not going to get carted off as a slave or anything?
The Doctor: Why ever would you think that?
Martha Jones: Well, not exactly white, in case you hadn’t noticed.
The Doctor: Well, I’m not exactly human. Just walk round like you own the place, always works for me.
I’d like to think that if he did end up as anything other than a white male, the Doctor would still continue to walk round like he or she owned the place. The Doctor’s one of the most brilliant, charismatic people in all time and space, and wouldn’t let provincial customs about race and sex get in the way of that.
Sounds to me like The Doctor has very little understanding of his white male privilege.
Well, smart as he is, there’s a few things about humans the Doctor doesn’t understand, aren’t there?- and believe me, I knew I was entering dodgy territory when I wrote that. But (for better or worse) there’s a great big streak of old school colonial adventure stories like John Carter of Mars right through Doctor Who. It’s there in Hartnell’s era, when he’s teaching the savage cavemen the secret of fire and the primitive Thals how violence is totally awesome, but it’s still there when he single-handedly decides to overturn the rule of the Jagrofess on Satellite 5, or sort out the Starship UK.
My defence for him still doing this regardless of what shape he is is that the Doctor’s Time Lord privilege far, far outstrips his white male privilege.