First of all, read this. I'm assuming you know that, recently, the BBC announced that Matt Smith will be leaving the show, generating the occasion for the casting of a new Doctor, and that Peter Capaldi has been announced as the actor chosen to fill that role. There had been some drama over whether they'd choose a female actor (though apparently not behind the scenes, where executive producer Steven Moffat reportedly had a short-list of one name). They did not. Most people I've seen like that; a few, including the author of this column, do not. This column is, in my opinion, mind-bogglingly bad, and for your reading pleasure I am now going to go through it very nearly line by line and point out all the horrible errors.
- The first sentence is a lie. This column itself is essentially the only negative reaction to the Capaldi announcement that I've seen. Everything else has been nearly unanimously positive. No sighs of disappointment. For evidence, check this round-up of press reaction. So, 0-1.
- The second paragraph is largely just run-of-the-mill recitation of the set-up behind the show, although I think she overstates things in suggesting that many or most fans were hoping for a woman being cast. I suppose there are lots of Whovians, so "many" is probably technically accurate, but she suggests that they were more than a tiny minority, I think, and they definitely weren't.
- The third paragraph can be broken down into three parts. The first sentence is unobjectionable except as set-up for what follows. The second sentence, first of all, it wouldn't have been any of the three of them, and anyway, okay, so what? You get more enjoyment out of watching any female actor play a part than you could out of a great performance by a male actor? Are you conceiving of this thing purely as a venue for factional boosterism?
- The third sentence of that paragraph contains, to my mind, two of the chief mistakes in the column. First of all, who told you that Time Lords can "regenerate into any form"? They pretty clearly can't; for one thing, it seems to be true that they're limited to humanoid forms, the Doctor's parting remarks to Rose in "The Parting of the Ways" notwithstanding. Now sure, there's a throw-away line in the Neil Gaiman-written episode "The Doctor's Wife" suggesting that Time Lords can, at least occasionally, change gender, but if you take the canon of the show as serious empirical evidence it seems pretty clear that usually they don't.
- And second, who told you that regeneration constitutes the Doctor "inventing himself"? It's definitely true that regeneration involves the producers of the show reinventing the Doctor, with deliberate intention and foresight. But the Doctor doesn't get to particularly choose what his next incarnation will look like. He's very explicit, at least in both his modern-era regenerations, that he has very little control over the process or even ability to foresee its results. Now, sure, there's some suggesting that other Time Lords like the Master have greater ability to influence their regenerations, and there was that time when Romana appeared to literally try on various new forms for size before finally settling on the image of some princess she and the Doctor had met in their recent travels. (No, seriously.) But basically it does seem that regeneration is an uncontrollable, unpredictable process.
- And anyway, if the Doctor could control his regeneration, even at the level of gender or race or accent or whatever, isn't there an obvious reason for why he might choose to basically stay within a pretty narrow white/British/male band? This column is written by a transgendered woman, who presumably has experienced the feeling that her self-identity did not match her body, and took steps to remedy that by changing her body. She should, therefore, I'd think, be sympathetic to the idea that people have an interest in feeling like their body matches their self-identity. The Doctor has always been male, with light-colored skin, and (when Anglophone humans hear him talk at any rate) a British accent. Maybe that's just how he thinks of himself? Maybe he'd find it very very odd to wake up from a regeneration and have totally different, you know, reproductive organs? Is it really that progressive to force upon this poor Time Lord a period of serious gender identity issues for the supposed sake of some human political cause?
- Okay, so, having covered that sentence with about two dozen sentences of my own, I'll move on. The next five paragraphs involve discussions of various feelings of disappointment or joy when various offices of power were or weren't filled by excitingly diverse people. The first comparison is to the Pope, where she admits there's no effing prayer for any actual demographic diversity. Nevertheless! She trudges along with the comparison to the 2005 papal election, when despite the hope of some for the elevation of a not-incredibly-hateful person, they went with Cardinal Ratzinger, who was incredibly hateful and a hateful, vicious pope. That sucked! And yes, there are some indications that the current pope is somewhat less hateful, which is nice for a change.
- Next up is the Presidency, where, we are told, the election of Barack Obama "made it seem, fleetingly, as if there were no more glass ceilings, for offices from president to pontiff." This is perhaps a good point to mention perhaps the central sin of this article, namely its treatment of the Doctor as an office, as a title, akin to being President or Pope or whatever. He's not an office, he's a person. I am 100% on board with the idea that human civilization needs to stop the whole stupid thing about having almost all positions of power get filled by men. Neither "the Doctor" nor "the actor playing the Doctor" is an office of power. Unlike the President, the Doctor has (or should have, at least) the feeling of narrative and character continuity. It's supposed to be the same person, even though he looks different different times. If we elect Hillary Clinton President in 2016, we won't all be saying, wait, how did Mr. President turn into this completely other person? Nor, given that we know they are just plain different people, would we be shocked that, in becoming a different person, the President switched from being male to female all of a sudden. Unlike the 41st, 42nd, 43rd, 44th, etc. Presidents, however, the 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, etc. Doctors genuinely are supposed to be the same person. That fact doesn't settle the question of whether it's more interesting for Time Lords to have the ability to change genders upon regenerations, as their Star Trek kinda-sorta-analogues Trills do routinely, but it does mean that you can't discuss the issue just by comparing it to the eminently correct fact that we need more women in positions of power.
- Then there's a paragraph about how awesome it is that some transgendered people have recently gotten to have, you know, jobs, and even jobs reasonably close to something you could call power. Good for them! Then there's a paragraph of skepticism that academic administrators are actually all that pleased to have the transgendered people around. Relevant to the Doctor how exactly?
- Then there's a paragraph that begins the transition to the odd concluding 'graph, where she mentions that her grandfather never even got to see a Catholic President, but now we've got a black one and a pope who sounds like he isn't chomping at the bit to personally whip gay people in hell.
- Which brings me to the odd concluding paragraph. Let's start with the bit that's simply getting Whovian mythology wrong. She basically seems to be thinking that we may not see another Doctor after Capaldi's, or at least not very many. This is, um, wrong. Every signal from both Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat, as well as, for what it's worth, Neil Gaiman, is that the people running the modern version of Doctor Who are committed to blowing through the supposed 13-life limit. It makes sense: the show is hugely successful and if you ignore that "limit" you get a show that's conceptually immortal: there's no need to cancel it for anything about actors wanting to depart or whatever. The BBC can just keep it going literally as long as it keeps being good enough for people to keep liking it. Don't worry, the show's not running out of time any time soon.
- And then there's the last two sentences, which are a perfect encapsulation of the problem with the whole bloody thing. Here, I'll reprint them in full:
"As the producers think about whom they want to take on the role next, they should keep in mind the way people’s hopes are lifted when they see someone breaking the glass ceiling, even when it’s for something as seemingly trivial as a hero on a science-fiction program. Equal opportunity matters — in Doctor Who’s universe as well as our own."
This is literally advocacy of the idea that, in essentially all walks of life, white men must be positively discriminated against, even for things they might genuinely be best-suited for (because, note, she advances literally zero arguments that a not-white-male actor would be the best choice for this role from a narrative and creative perspective), for the purpose of giving not-white-men everywhere warm fuzzy feelings when they see their fellow not-white-men being successful. Not because, as with political offices, not giving women positions of power is wildly oppressive and results in the people in power perpetuating policies that continue to oppress women even further. Not because, as with educational opportunities, being given those opportunities will allow historically underprivileged groups to gain some advantages going forward and stop being so underprivileged. Just because, apparently, one must never pass up an opportunity to bestow anything that looks like a promotion or opportunity or honor upon a non-white person. And I say this as someone who's a big fan of both of those other reasons I mentioned for doing affirmative action, but that's no way to run a TV show! This isn't even affirmative action, it's just a very, I dunno, reactionary sentiment of, like, "ugh, I'm sick of all these stupid white men on my television screen."
I suppose that's a fair enough sentiment, and if you just can't enjoy watching a character portrayed by a white male actor then you might eventually have to stop watching and enjoying Doctor Who. In fact, you might say that, for someone with this woman's perspective, the optimal result might in fact be for the BBC to decide, as they definitely won't, to abide by the 12-regeneration limit and end the show in a few years, and then have there be other cool shows with exciting female protagonists. Or just skip the part where Doctor Who gets killed off and just have shows with exciting female protagonists. You could try this one. Or this one. And, okay, yes, there aren't as many of them as there should be, and that's a huge problem and it needs to change. That's part of what makes Buffy so very awesome. But the solution is to do what Joss did, and make new shows with awesome female protagonists, not to repurpose an existing show with an existing awesome male protagonist in a way that doesn't make any story sense. Maybe try to do something like what Elementary is doing with "Joan Watson," except better, because in that case at least you're not trying to maintain continuity with the universe in which Dr. John Watson exists, you're exploring a slightly different universe in which he's female.
I should emphasize how much I do think that the thing where only men, and in particularly only white men, get to run the world is horrible and needs to die, and that in cases like that of the looming Federal Reserve appointment I actually do think that, between any two roughly-equally-qualified-and-competent(-and-liberal) candidates for a given position of power, as much as possible one should give those positions to women. And I'm in full sympathy with the movement for transgendered equality. But that doesn't require switching people's genders willy-nilly with no regard for the impact upon their stories or characters. And I will mention that I've recently conceived, for the first time, a notion of how they could work in a female Doctor in a way that would have a plausible in-universe explanation (involving things getting weird after the first 13 incarnations), although I'm not sure I favor doing so, mostly because of the stuff I mentioned earlier about how the Doctor has a gender identity, or he might have anyway, and even if it would be mechanically possible to switch him it might yet do damage to the narrative continuity.
And it's really disappointing that this author, who is apparently an English professor and all of whose observations about actual politics are completely correct, just ignores both any of the potential issues or problems with having a female Doctor and any differences between the question of the Doctor's demographic identity and the question of the demographic identity of Presidents and popes and the like. There would've been, I think, an interesting column to be written about the issues around using characters drawn from the set who were created when avowed, open sexism ruled the world and who are therefore all men in the modern age when we correctly don't tolerate having all our heroes being men. But that wasn't what we got.
Oh, and also, if they ever do have a female Doctor, she had bloody well better not wear a shoe that looks remotely like the one pictured with a TARDIS stilletto in the illustration accompaniment to this column. Jeez.
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