I was twelve years old (give or take a year, maybe two) when I chanced upon a novelization of a Doctor Who<\/em> episode in the SF section of my local library. I don\u2019t remember which episode but I know it was a Fourth Doctor adventure.<\/p>\n All the novelizations published in the US at the time had an introduction by Harlan Ellison<\/a> explaining the fundamentals of the series, and why, as the subtle and charming Ellison put it, \u201cStar Wars is adolescent nonsense; Close Encounters is obscurist drivel; Star Trek can turn your brains into puree of bat guano; the greatest science fiction series of all time is Doctor Who! And I\u2019ll take you all on, one-by-one or all in a bunch to back it up!\u201d<\/p>\n Well, I was a bit put off by that. But I enjoyed the story.<\/p>\n Some months later, flipping though the UHF band<\/a> one afternoon, I happened on the local PBS affiliate and a program that featured a guy with a British accent and an absurdly long scarf. \u201cHey! This is that guy in the book!\u201d<\/p>\n I remember watching the Doctor on the small black-and-white set in my parent\u2019s bedroom as a kid; later, in college and grad school, he was on midnight on Sunday. If I wasn\u2019t home, the VCR was set. (At one point Doctor Who<\/i> was preceded by Red Dwarf<\/i>, which introduced me to a different sort of British SF.)<\/p>\n I think every episode from the Third Doctor on has passed in front of my eyes at least once \u2014 even the infamous \u201cTrial of a Time Lord\u201d season \u2014 as well as a number of the First and Second Doctors\u2019 adventures.<\/p>\n My love for the series rubbed off on my mom. When she was troubled by chronic pain after an accident at work and could not sleep, sometimes she would sit up watching the Doctor outwit rubber-headed monsters in various British rock quarries<\/a>.<\/p>\n And now our long-time hero is set to become a heroine.<\/p>\n Gender switching and non-conformity is something of a SF staple. Heinlein\u2019s I Will Fear No Evil<\/i> has a man\u2019s brain transplanted into a woman\u2019s body, while the final episode of Star Trek<\/i> (original series) is \u201cTurnabout Intruder\u201d, where Captain Kirk is forced into a mind\/body swap by Dr. Janice Lester, a bitter ex-paramour. (It\u2019s widely regarded as awful and sexist, one of the worst episodes of the series.)<\/p>\n Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s The Left Hand of Darkness<\/i> takes place on a planet whose human inhabitants (presumably genetically modified) are biologically androgynous most of the time, only occasionally assuming male or female characteristics. In John Varley\u2019s Steel Beach<\/i>, changing one\u2019s anatomical sex is a routine sort of cosmetic surgery.<\/p>\n And more options are possible when dealing with alien species. I just read John Brunner\u2019s Total Eclipse<\/i>, where human archaeologists investigate the ruins of a long-extinct civilization whose species changed from male to female over their lifespan. The Tenctonese of the Alien Nation<\/i> TV series have a third \u201cbinnaum\u201d sex, while Asimov\u2019s The Gods Themselves<\/i> features parallel-universe aliens with a three-sex biology, who triad-bond and (spoiler alert, but the book is from 1972) merge into a single individual when they mature.<\/p>\n Some of these explorations have been widely praised as outstanding literature (The Left Hand of Darkness<\/i> is a notable example). Other works have been little more than a vehicle for the author\u2019s prejudices about gender. The tapestry of SF has a thick thread, dating back to the pulps, of manly men oozing masculine competence as they subjugate the cosmos and women both alien and terrestrial. I can forgive writers from the 1930s for such attitudes, but it\u2019s kind of shameful that we can still find them today.<\/p>\n There is also a thin thread of radical feminist utopias, such as Alice Sheldon (writing as James Tiptree, Jr.)\u2019s Houston, Houston, Do You Read?<\/a><\/i>, that posit that the key to solving the world\u2019s problems is to eliminate men, also a position with which I must disagree.<\/p>\n Still, any true SF fan should be comfortable with at least a bit of gender fluidity and alternative expressions.<\/p>\n But we fans of long-running franchises also value internal consistency, a.k.a. continuity.<\/p>\n Of course no long-running series gets it exactly right. Why does the tombstone Gary Mitchell creates for his old friend James Kirk read \u201cJames R. Kirk\u201d when we all know it\u2019s James T. Kirk? How did Boba Fett get to Cloud City before the Millennium Falcon, when he was following them there? And what ever happened to Superman\u2019s \u201csuper ventriloquism\u201d power? But internal consistency is vital for a SF universe that lets us suspend disbelief.<\/p>\n One of the delights of Doctor Who<\/i> is a continuity running through 275 distinct stories<\/a>, all featuring the same hero. This is an important point: while the Doctor regenerates and changes some aspects of appearance and surface personality traits, he is the same person. It is not a new person taking over a position, like the various Green Lanterns over the years in the DC universe or Jane Foster taking up Mjolnir and the name Thor in Marvel continuity.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also important to understand that the Doctor has little control over the process of regeneration. Some commentators have gotten this very wrong. Vox\u2019s Caroline Framke, for example, describes the Doctor as \u201ca thousand-year-old alien who\u2019s free to take on any form it chooses.\u201d<\/a> This is just wrong, completely inconsistent with how regeneration is portrayed in the series.<\/p>\n The Doctor is not a shapeshifter. He is subject to a wrenching biological process beyond his control, and several post-regeneration stories have centered on the Doctor or his friends coming to terms with this unwanted and suddenly-imposed alteration in appearance and personality balance. (Indeed his second regeneration was imposed on him by the Time Lords as a punishment, along with exile on twentieth-century Earth. Poor fellow.) On the handful of occasions when he encounters his past selves there is discomfort on both sides about the changes that have been forced on him.<\/p>\n It is true that the Sisterhood of Karn, with a more advanced science of regeneration and under highly unusual circumstances (the Doctor having died on Karn and been temporarily revived), was able to guide the Eighth Doctor\u2019s regeneration into the War Doctor, and that they also offered a choice of gender \u2014 but they also spoke of how random the regeneration could be without their help. And it\u2019s true that the Twelfth Doctor, with a fresh set of regenerations granted him by the Time Lords, was subconsciously able to control some facial features (a plot element used to explain away the fact that Peter Capaldi had played a minor character in an earlier episode).<\/p>\n But these exceptional cases are light-years away from \u201cfree to take on any form it chooses.\u201d<\/p>\n The idea that some Time Lords sometimes change gender wasn\u2019t introduced into continuity until 2011 \u2014 just yesterday, in Who<\/i> terms \u2014 in the Neil Gaiman-penned episode The Doctor\u2019s Wife<\/i>. The Doctor mentions in passing how a fellow Time Lord, the Corsair, \u201cdidn\u2019t feel like himself unless he had [a certain tattoo] \u2014 or herself, a couple of times.\u201d<\/a> (He then approvingly notes, \u201cOoh, she was a bad girl!\u201d)<\/p>\n And that was a brilliant thing for Gaiman to slip into continuity! Transgender Time Lords \u2014 tattooed ones, at that \u2014 were probably not in the minds of the series\u2019s original creators, but certainly there\u2019s room in the show\u2019s universe for them. But in context it\u2019s clear that the Corsair is an extraordinary case. In all the series history prior to that, no one ever spoke of a Time Lord or Time Lady as \u201chimself, sometimes herself\u201d or vice-versa.<\/p>\n The writers built on that mention when they brought back the Master, one of the Doctor\u2019s oldest foes (and friends), as the Time Lady Missy. This was a bit of a stretch, but we\u2019d only seen four of the Master\u2019s regenerations before. He also had other, stolen lives which were not regenerations \u2014 it\u2019s complicated \u2014 but it allowed us to imagine other means by which the gender change could have occurred. So there was enough space in continuity to allow for it.<\/p>\n And Michelle Gomez did a bang-up job in portraying a female version of a character so sociopathic he once tried to hold the entire universe hostage unless it acknowledged him as ruler<\/a> \u2014 and (spoiler alert)\u00a0 yet making us believe her heel-face turn<\/a> at the end.<\/p>\n But over the past season the treatment of Time Lord gender became increasingly hamfisted and inconsistent with continuity. They\u2019ve dropped hints that the Doctor may have once been a woman, which does not fit at all, and written him as unable to remember whether his frenemy was a man or a woman at a given time.<\/p>\n It seems they are trying to re-write continuity so that all Time Lords are effectively non-binary. \u201cWe\u2019re billions of years beyond your petty human obsession with gender and its associated stereotypes,\u201d claims the Doctor in the penultimate episode.<\/p>\n So fans are asking, \u201cHaven\u2019t you called yourself a grandfather, not a grandparent, for a thousand years now? Didn\u2019t you speak of the gender-swapping Corsair as an extraordinary case? Didn\u2019t you spend almost all of this program\u2019s history referring to both the Master and yourself as male? Didn\u2019t we see you as a boy in flashback episodes, and haven\u2019t we accounted for all of your regenerations and know that you stayed male through all of them, so why are you pretending that your gender was ever uncertain?\u201d<\/p>\n But it looks like the writers have given us their answer. The Doctor\u2019s companion Bill, as if speaking for fans, replies to his we\u2019re-so-above-that claim by pointing out their gender-specific language, saying \u201cBut you still call yourselves \u2018Time Lords<\/i>\u2018\u201d.<\/p>\n To which the Doctor, as if speaking for the writers, replied, \u201cYeah, shut up.\u201d<\/p>\n The change seems to be driven by external ideas about contemporary gender politics (that \u201cpetty human obsession with gender\u201d) rather than anything internal to the story. That has made for controversy.<\/p>\n Fifth Doctor actor Peter Davison<\/a> called the change \u201cthe loss of a role model for boys\u201d, and has been criticized for it. Sixth Doctor Colin Baker replied, \u201c[Y]ou don\u2019t have to be of a gender of someone to be a role model. Can\u2019t you be a role model as people?\u201d<\/p>\n Yet a lot of the cheering about the change is coming from people saying, in effect, \u201cFinally, little girls have a leading female to look up to!\u201d If it is correct that kids benefit from a same-gender role model, then Davison is correct that boys are losing one, and at the very least we ought to pause to consider that.<\/p>\n If it is not, then a whole lot of the cheering is based on an incorrect sentiment.<\/p>\n Albert Bandura\u2019s Bobo doll experiments<\/a> from the 1960s suggest not only that both boys and girls respond to same-gender role models more effectively than to different-gender ones, but that the difference is more extreme for boys. So Davison may have a point.<\/p>\n If boys respond better to male role models than to female ones, and if their greater likelihood of growing into either perpetrators or victims of violence<\/a> suggests they might be more in need of good role models, then we ought to tread carefully.<\/p>\n On the other hand, social constructs about gender are baked so deep into culture that it\u2019s hard to tease out whether something might be an inherent difference or the result of the socialization that starts at birth. (It\u2019s also worth repeating, as I\u2019ve stressed before, that if there are inherent differences between genders they are a matter of statistical averages and ranges, not absolute partitioning.<\/a>)<\/p>\n If it\u2019s all socialization, maybe deliberately plopping little Johnny down to watch a Time Lady save the world could work, and it might be a worthwhile experiment. Though it seems to me that a female role-model developed from scratch, rather than a male one retread as female, would probably work better.<\/p>\n All that said, perhaps they\u2019ll find a way to work in the change that respects continuity. For example, after losing Clara and Bill and Missy, and weary beyond imagining after his experience in the Confession Dial, the Doctor decides the only way to continue is a complete abandonment of the past. Looking for a way to feel closer to the women he has lost, he journeys to Karn \u2014 barely holding an unguided regeneration at bay \u2014 to ask the Sisterhood to guide him in a gender-switch regeneration.<\/p>\n (You can have that one for free, BBC, if you like it.)<\/p>\n![\"drwho_mf\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/560\/2017\/07\/drwho_mf.jpg\")
<\/a><\/h3>\nGender in SF<\/h3>\n
Continuity<\/h3>\n
![\"The](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/560\/2017\/07\/1stdoc-300x225.jpg\")
<\/a>Role Models<\/h3>\n