The Time Lord returns.... as a woman?
Posted on 16 July 2018
“The casting of the Doctor is a contentious issue. Choosing Whittaker is a first step for the show towards achieving a more diverse range of actors in the title role, which has previously only been performed by cisgender, white men.
However laudable this decision may be, as a non-binary, transgender viewer of this primetime series, and long-time fan of the show, I’m waiting in anticipation to see whether this is a positive direction for the show to take.
How will the writers handle the Doctor’s change in gender? People who identify as non-binary are neither male nor female; as such they often also include themselves under the umbrella of ‘transgender’, not identifying with the gender that they were assigned at birth as a result of their perceived physiology.
Beyond obsession
On the surface, the most recent series seems to have embraced a non-binary concept of gender, at least in theory: “We’re the most civilised civilisation in the universe,” the Twelfth Doctor claims in ‘World Enough and Time’. “We’re billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes.”
As his companion, Bill Potts, points out, however, “But you still call yourselves ‘Time Lords’,” to which the Doctor responds “Yeah, shut up.” Refusing to adapt their use of language to express a more inclusive conception of minority genders is one example of how science fiction in general falls short in trying to depict a wider range of identities.
Another pitfall of Doctor Who, is the conflation between biological sex and gender identity. Just because the Doctor now appears to have a female body shouldn’t mean that they (and I use a gender neutral pronoun deliberately) have to now identify as a woman.
More complex
Even the idea of being “flexible on the whole man-woman thing” shows how the show is still confined by its creative team’s binary understanding of gender. Gender is a more complex matter than either biological sex, or gender performance, as gender theorist Judith Butler has proposed.
In my recent dissertation, I argue that gender should be considered to be an assemblage, based on Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari’s model of rhizomatic thought, which allows for simultaneous multiple interpretations of a subject. Gender can be considered to be composed of many different aspects including physiology, psychology, social presentation and legal recognition.
In practice, when watching a television show such as Doctor Who, a sceptical viewing lens is called for. The binary gendered language used to express how the Doctor is perceived, including ‘Time Lord’, ‘Missy’, or ‘man’/’woman’, are only reflective of the social and political facets of the Doctor’s gender, or rather, the Doctor’s gender in society. They don’t mean that the Doctor is a woman.
New series
If Time Lords are indeed "billions of years beyond (our) petty human obsession with gender", it seems plausible that they, with their physiological fluidity, have a more non-binary conception of gender identities.
Whether Chris Chibnall and his team will attempt to portray this, or indeed any trans-sympathetic experience of how the Doctor's regeneration affects their experience of sex and gender, remains to be seen when the new series airs.”
Shevek's dissertation is called 'Close Encounters of the Non-binary Kind: Alien Embodiment and (Mis)gendering in Science Fiction.'