A restaurant, early November 2014:
‘Ah, m’sieur, I see you have finished. Was everything to your satisfaction?’
‘Um, well, no, not really…’
‘I am most sorry to hear that. What was the problem?’
‘Well, you know me, you know how much I love the Special Famous Pie. I’ve been eating it for decades, after all…’
‘Mmm-hmmm?’
‘Well – I couldn’t help noticing – you’ve changed some of the apple in the Special Famous Pie to blackberries.’
‘Well, as I am sure m’sieur knows, the recipe for Special Famous Pie is constantly evolving…’
‘Oh, sure, I know. Watching it evolve and become more sophisticated down the years is part of the pleasure, and I know that the way you change the kind of apple you use for the main filling is an essential part of what makes it Special Famous Pie.’
‘And so what is the problem…?’
‘Well, Special Famous Pie is apple pie. If you start putting different fillings in it’s not really the same pie, is it?’
‘Well, sir, I have to say that the new pie is very popular with many people. You may have seen a number of recent blog posts with names like Why Special Famous Pie Could and Should Be Made With Blackberries. I should say that we are probably going to change all the apple to blackberries in the not too distant future. ‘
‘You are? Why in God’s name would you do that?’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, sir, I’d no idea you were that type of person.’
‘What type of person?’
‘The type who is prejudiced against blackberries.’
‘I’m not prejudiced against blackberries, I just don’t want them in an apple pie. I want apple in my apple pie.’
‘Yes, m’sieur, but it’s not called apple pie. It’s called Special Famous Pie. It doesn’t have to have apples in it, don’t you see?’
‘You’ve been making Special Famous Pie for over fifty years, and it’s always, always had apples in it. You can’t suddenly change the heart of the recipe and claim it’s the same thing.’
‘Well, m’sieur, you must recall that Special Famous Pie was invented many years ago, when we lived in an apple-dominated culture, and blackberries have for a long time been under-represented in restaurants…’
‘So make more blackberry desserts. It doesn’t mean you have to put blackberries in the apple pie. It is possible to have both, you know.’
‘Ah yes, but making our Special Famous apple pie using blackberries will be an important statement of principle.’
‘Which principle would that be?’
‘That apples and blackberries are equally good.’
‘No, the statement you’re making is that apples and blackberries are identical, which they are plainly not to anyone with taste buds and a brain. I’m not saying one is better than the other, but they are fundamentally different things.’
‘M’sieur, it’s very important to have more blackberries in restaurants.’
‘And I’m not arguing with you, but as well as Special Famous Pie you make a lot of other bland and rather dreary apple dishes – you invent a new one every couple of years. Why not stop making those and try making a new blackberry dish instead?’
‘Well, those dishes are not as popular or important as the Special Famous Pie. Also, making an apple dish with blackberries sends an important message that the two of them are of equal importance.’
‘I think it’s sending the message that you’re wilfully trying to ignore the fact that apples and blackberries are two different things. Also that there’s something wrong with apple pie that can only be fixed by making it with blackberries. Which isn’t really much of a fix at all as you’re no longer making apple pie in any meaningful sense.’
‘M’sieur, we are not changing anything. It will have the same name, it will be cooked in the same oven, most of the same ingredients will be same, it will still be a delicious fruit-based dessert -‘
‘Yes, but it was conceived as an apple pie, it became popular as an apple pie, it has five decades of accreted history and traditions as an apple pie, and making it without apple basically means you are making a different pie!!!’
‘The new style Special Famous Pie is going to be a delicious pie, sir.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it will be very popular with people who have it as an article of faith that there is no actual difference between different kinds of fruit. And I suppose there’s even a chance that it will be a good pie. But it won’t actually be Special Famous Pie, because that’s made with apple. That’s an essential part of the character.’
‘The character, sir?’
‘The character of the pie, I mean. What you’re talking about is a new pie with a completely different character. I can’t believe you’re doing this. You wouldn’t do this to any other dish.’
‘Well, that’s what makes Special Famous Pie so special, sir, that we can do this to it. No other pie has both a tradition of regularly changing its recipe and is so non-specific about its ingredients.’
‘You mean that because it isn’t specifically called Special Famous Apple Pie, the apple which is the main ingredient is somehow dispensable? That’s nonsense. You have no idea about what makes Special Famous Pie work.’
‘Well, perhaps, but we are in charge of it and we can do what we like. In the end it is only a pie, after all.’
‘Maybe so, but it’s still a pie I love and it makes me very angry to see it mucked about with this way. If there is no place for traditional Special Famous Pie with apples in it I’d rather you just stopped making it entirely than carried on with this slightly absurd travesty of a pie.’
‘Well, m’sieur, look at it this way: if the new style pie fails we can always go back to making the old pie. I expect we will alternate between apple and blackberry fillings anyway, in future.’
‘But – but – you’re still making two different kinds of pie and pretending they’re the same one. You’re still ignoring how the world actually works. Apples and blackberries are two different things.’
‘I’m sorry, sir, I will have to ask you to keep that kind of opinion to yourself in a public restaurant from now on.’
‘From now on? You actually think I’m going to carry on eating here?’
‘Well, m’sieur, you said yourself you have been eating and enjoying Special Famous Pie for decades, so of course you will carry on eating it, no matter what we do to it…’
‘No! No! Have you been listening to me? It’s not the same pie any more, no matter what anyone says. I’m damned if I’m going to eat blackberry pie and pretend it’s sort-of-like-apple just because you tell me there’s no difference. If I can’t get proper Special Famous Pie, I’ll take my custom elsewhere, thank you very much.’
‘Ah well. We will see you again, when we change back to apple for a bit.’
‘I think you presume too much of my loyalty. This whole situation makes me very, very angry. Can I speak to the head chef, please?’
‘Alas, m’sieur, Mr Moffat is out to lunch.’
‘No kidding.’
Needless to say, I disagree, but I feel we may have had this conversation before…
Well, true, but given the powers that be seem to be preparing the ground for the abolition of the apple-blackberry distinction, I felt the need to put the pro-distinction argument in print as cogently as I could. Also venting fury felt necessary too, just for the sake of letting me sleep.
Fair enough, it’s your blog. Just felt the need to highlight my continued dissension. Besides, all the ‘end of the show’ stuff that’s come before hasn’t actually ended the show. Not permanently. I say ‘why the hell not?’
I’m not aware of a comparable change being seriously proposed or discussed at any previous moment. The only remotely comparable moment in the history of the pie came nearly 50 years ago, and they got it very right on that occasion: make the minimal necessary change to the character (of the pie), not kick everything up in the air and make fundamental alterations just for the sake of it.
Firstly, we do live in a world where gender and identity are more fluid, so a character who changes fundamentally on average every 3 to 5 years is pretty well-placed to represent that.
Secondly, if you put aside the gender issue, the Doctor (or pie, if you prefer) has changed massively. 6’s angry egotist couldn’t be more different from 2’s playful hobo, 7’s near-godlike plotter or 9’s PTSD war criminal. The character changes hugely from Doctor to Doctor. With the right writing, changing his race or gender won’t be any more jarring than watching the wrong two Doctors back-to-back.
Who’d have guessed it, but I utterly disagree.
‘Gender and identity are more fluid’? I’m still the same person I was ten years ago; I’m guessing you feel the same way about yourself. People are not, unless I’ve been missing a lot of news stories, casually changing their gender. Indeed I thought one of the things underpinning sympathetic treatment of transsexual people as a Good Thing is that they are essentially *not* changing their gender; gender is a more fundamental thing than the body one happens to be issued with, and what happens with SRS is that a person is moving towards a body that matches their innate, unchanging gender identity.
I wouldn’t necessary have recognised any of the iterations of the character from those extreme (I believe the expression is ‘Flanderised’, but I’m not sure never having used it before) descriptions. The core character has not radically changed since the very early years of the series, and there are a whole array of aspects to him that are essentially male (as even Moffat used to acknowledge, before he lost the plot).
Race isn’t an issue for me, any more than height or weight or hair colour or shoe size, as it seems to me to be largely cosmetic. Everyone’s height, weight, appearance, even some aspects of their personality will change over the course of their life. But their gender will not.
This is why the ‘this is an alien pie, we can do what we want with it’ argument doesn’t hold water for me. Quite apart from the fact the character comes from a male archetype (the Fool, if you want to be specific), he differs from human beings only in degree, rather than in kind: technically he’s superhuman rather than really alien in every meaningful respect.
We’ve been dealing with a male character for over fifty years. To suddenly announce that the character is not actually male, but instead belongs to a category which (tellingly) we don’t even have a word for, constitutes such a fundamental change in identity that we’re effectively talking about a different character.
I like the original character (to be honest, ‘like’ understates it by several orders of magnitude). I have no interest whatsoever in stories attempting to replace him with a different character and pretend nothing has happened, especially when there’s no compelling reason to make such a fundamental change.
What traits signify ‘male aspects’ that a woman can’t also A) have and B) portray?
I’m not talking about individuals having changed, I’m talking about the way we understand gender has changed. As you said yourself – today we know that a person can’t me physically male and mentally female or androgynous (the word you were looking for). It’s this reason that we have the word/affix ‘cis’, to answer a question you asked yourself earlier in the year. Hell, even Shakespearean characters have been genderswapped without any real change to the fundementals of who the character is (I really recommend Helen Mirren’s Prospera in the 2010 “The Tempest” as a good example of this).
As to the Fool archetype:
“The Fool/Jester archetype urges us to enjoy the process of our lives. Although the Fool/Jester can be prone to laziness and dissipation, the positive Fool/Jester invites us all out to play–showing us how to turn our work, our interactions with others, and even the most mundane tasks into FUN. The goal of the Fool/Jester is perhaps the wisest goal of all, which is just to enjoy life as it is, with all its paradoxes and dilemmas. What causes most dread in the Fool/Jester is a lack of stimulation and being ‘not alive’. They must seek to ‘be’, perhaps as the Sage, but may not understand this.” (http://www.uiltexas.org/files/capitalconference/Twelve_Character_Archetypes.pdf)
This doesn’t really describe the origins of the First Doctor, nor really many of 3’s interactions. 7 and 9 try to be this archetype, but demonstrate traits which fall much more comfortably into another. Same with the War Doctor and 12. Although the Fool is most commonly who the Doctor is, it’s far from the rule.
With this in mind, you could argue that a ‘Foolish’ female Doctor would be much closer to who the Doctor ‘should be’ than say scheming 8 or grumpy 1, 3, War and 12.
Just saying that there’s both room and president for change without being overly concerned with the Doctor’s reproductive organs.
At the risk of sounding overly pragmatic, I would say the main trait signifying a male aspect is *being male*. Their gender is one of the first things you notice when you actually meet a person, all other things being equal; and even should one succeed in deceiving you as to their gender, when you discover this the sense of surprise and disorientation is much greater than if you learn they are – for example – wearing a wig or something similar.
I think the root of our disagreement is that I see genders as things in and of themselves, an essential part of identity, and furthermore one with an either/or setting (for people-as-we-understand-them at least), not a spectrum from male to female with some vaguely androgynous zone in the middle. Changing gender necessarily means a change of identity. Note that I am talking about individuals – one in particular.
For a fictional character to be more than an empty cipher they have to at least attempt to resemble a ‘real’ person. I have no problems with believing in male or female fictional characters, obviously. I don’t have a problem with a character who is not gendered in the human sense, though off the top of my head I can’t think of one – even aliens and AIs tend to be either ‘he’ or ‘she’, which to me indicates people are simply wired to think in terms of the he/she dichotomy, it’s an essential part of human nature. But I can’t get my head round the he-then-she-then-presumably-at-some-future-point-he-again idea of gender fans of the regenderation concept seem to be proposing. You’re suggesting a form of intelligence and identity completely alien to human experience, something not previously suggested at any point. The change you’re suggesting would mean taking an identifiable character and turning him into an abstract blob.
For the record, my wondering about the ‘cis’ thing was not with regard to what it meant, but why we need it at all when ‘non-transgender’ covers the same semantic territory rather more accessibly. Whether genderswapping a character leaves them fundamentally unchanged is surely a matter of opinion; I’m personally dubious, as you’d expect. The 2010 version of The Tempest got such lousy reviews I didn’t go near it.
The definition of the Fool archetype I came across was rather different, focussing on the non-acquisitive, freedom-loving, free-thinking nature of the character. I don’t have it to hand, alas. But I will say that the writer differentiated between male and female archetypes, and didn’t feel the need to justify this.
I didn’t mention reproduction, but when the subject has come up, the words used were ‘grandfather’, and ‘dad’, not ‘grandchild’ and ‘grandparent’. Not that existing precedent seems to matter much if you’re keen on introducing a new version of the character…
Gender being black and white is just not how life is for a lot of people with androgyny very much on that scale in a variety of forms. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_continuum
And the Doctor being one single character is a conceit that each era of the show plays lip service to, but doesn’t really stand up. There are often things one Doctor does that others would not.
As for gender nouns and pronouns, you could say that the Doctor and anyone who refers to him are using the gender he identifies as in a given incarnation; just like polite people do when presented with someone who is not cis-gendered.
As for the uselessness of the word ‘cis’ when ‘non-transgender’ exists – that’s a silly argument. It’s why ‘non-white’ is not an accurate or particularly positive label to apply to PoCs in real life. You define people by what they are, not what they aren’t. We’re not non-black non-women, after all.
Hmm, well, that Wikipedia link reads more like a political manifesto than something descriptive. I notice also that the Wiki entry on androgyny branches off into something like twenty different articles covering everything from fashion to biology, so there seems to be a degree of ambiguity about what it means (ironically enough).
The Doctor being one single character is the premise of the series. If he had suddenly started robbing banks or being sexually aggressive I would agree with you that the character was presented inconsistently. Given we’re talking about a 30+ year history the consistency is impressive (if you ask me, anyway).
I suspect you weren’t present on the occasions I walked out of a games shop of our mutual acquaintance in disgust when a transexual gamer was subject to abuse and bullying. Just out of interest, once the dread day dawns and Miranda Hart or whoever starts starring in the series, when you refer to the character of the Doctor *in general*, in terms of the series’ entire history, what pronoun will you be using?
Didn’t say it was useless, just non-essential. (I also think that to presume a direct equivalency between transgender people and members of any ethnic group is questionable.) And in certain contexts I can imagine… well, look, would you find the sentence ‘It’s impossible for any non-black person to understand the significance of Dr King’s speech’ offensive? I wouldn’t. Sometimes you do define people by what they’re not, especially if they’re not members of a particular majority. That doesn’t necessarily imply they are of any less value as human beings, it just acknowledges that minorities and majorities are a fact of life (and now I am talking about society in general, not individuals).