As a trans person, I'm excited about the new Doctor.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of days, no doubt you will have heard that the BBC has just announced Jodie Whittaker as the 13th incarnation of Doctor Who, and the first female. A cultural phenomenon in the UK that has since spread all over the world, the show was first broadcast in 1963 and during its 54-year run Doctor Who has had a massive impact on the lives of people across every generation. Its transgressive storylines of exploration through time and space were the UK’s answer to Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek, and the Doctor’s constantly evolving incarnations and cool gadgets provided many an hour of dress-up play for my brother and I as kids.
However, it’s unarguable that Roddenberry and Star Trek were miles ahead of their UK counterparts in terms of equality and diversity (and I’m not talking about the aliens). Star Trek featured the first interracial kiss on primetime television, and cast one of the first, and best-loved, female sci-fi leads ever in Voyager’s Kathryn Janeway. Not to mention Deep Space Nine’s Benjamin Sisko, played by Avery Brooks. Doctor Who, in comparison, has had twelve white, male, British, and so far (as far as we can see), predominantly heterosexual, with a parade of young, attractive women cast in supporting roles as companions. It featured more intersectionally-diverse characters in guest roles (most memorably John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness, later a starring member of the cast of Torchwood), but otherwise left a lot to be desired.
As a Doctor Who fan, I’m very excited about the new Doctor. In my opinion, a female Doctor is way overdue, and it’s great that the hallowed halls of Who-lore will now include another actress in a leading role. As a trans person, I’m even more excited. We’ve already had Michelle Gomez as the Master (Missy), brilliantly twisted and absolutely perfect. In a programme where female characters are more often relegated to supporting roles as sidekicks, single-episode villains or damsel-in-distress victims, the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the Doctor, the heroine, is a win for kids like I was – kids who were the ‘wrong’ gender – everywhere. Watching Peter Capaldi undergo that transition, that magical change from one body to another, is just what those kids need to see. We’ve been telling children ‘You can be anything you want to be!’ for years, but that doesn’t often extend to gender and bodies.
And yet, there’s still a lot of people who stand completely against this decision. Looking through the trending Doctor Who tag on Twitter reveals the sexism and misogyny behind popular fandom:
sorry, the Doctor has always been a man. Changing him to a woman seems forced. Like making the master a woman. Didn't work #NotMyDoctor
RIP Doctor Who 1963 - 2017. It was good while it lasted #notmydoctor #thedoctorisaman
Doctor Who filming SUSPENDED as new Timelord can’t park Tardis .... sorry I just had to share this...kinda funny
Were the BBC right to cast a woman as doctor who? I say wrong some characters are eternal.James Bond a man,Mrs Marple,Buffy women
The reactions to the casting, and gender, of the new Doctor is reminiscent of fandom reactions to 2016’s Ghostbusters remake featuring an all-female cast and which provoked similar outcry. It rings a very tiresome bell for me as a trans person, and no doubt to the rest of the Who-watching trans community. The ‘My childhood is ruined!’ responses are something we’ve been living through for our entire lives. Our childhoods were ruined by the wrong gender too: predominantly, by other people assuming that because we were born looking one way, that we had to conform to the expectations placed on people with those bodies and that we could never escape those expectations. And when we dared to disagree, to question, to assert our gender as different, people would question our knowledge of ourselves or even outright reject and deny us. ‘But the Doctor’s a man! He’s always been a man!’ is exactly the same as those people saying, ‘But you were born a girl! You’ll always be a woman!’ to me. I was born with a particular body, and grew up having particular characteristics, that people love to tell me I’ll never be able to change, that I’ll never be ‘real’ in their eyes. The equivalent of the ‘#NotMyDoctor’ Twitter hashtag.
Of course, trans people don’t have the luxury of the Time Lord’s ability to regenerate into whatever body they feel like. We aren’t able to melt into a cloud of gold sparkles and come out as our ‘right’ selves, with all the bits and pieces we should’ve always had but didn’t. Instead, we have to go through the gruelling process of social transition (names, titles, pronouns, etc.), and, if we feel it’s what we want to do, hormones and surgery. We have to either suffer the glacial pace of the overburdened and few-and-far-between NHS gender identity services, or else pay around £200 per appointment to go private, not including the costs of hormone prescriptions and/or surgery. It’s slow, difficult, and sometimes painful. But it’s worth it.
Trans people are having their day in the media’s spotlight at the moment. I have to admit, I think it’s the perfect time for the Doctor to have hers, too.
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