Ch Ch Ch Ch Changes. Phases, Doctor Who and the Gender Recognition Act

As I write this, today is the deadline for people to submit their responses to the UK Gender Recognition Act consultation (it will have passed by the time you're reading this) and news has just broken of the Trump administration's musings around the possibility of eradicating trans identities. There is always a lot of Twitter ‘discussion’ (to put it politely) around Trans issues but lately the noise has reached maddening levels. Pretty tough if you’re just a normal Trans person trying to go about your ordinary cat-meme youtube-recipe life. That’s not me, by the way, I am cisgender, but I'm interested in, and disturbed by, the current struggle for Trans equality and the escalation of the oppression of my Transgender friends and family.

Also in the last few weeks the new Doctor Who series has started, and I have a vested interest in that too (politically speaking, the world needs Doctor Who right now. Tell me I’m wrong. Don’t, because I’m not) and for me it’s impossible not to conflate the righteous development of the Doctor with the march of Trans liberation (and actually the liberation of humanity in general). It’s about phases.

Lots of people tell Transgender kids that they’re ‘going through a phase’. Sometimes they hear it from family. Sometimes they hear it from social media. They hear it from teachers. They hear it from National newspapers, famous and beloved writers, popstars… It’s everywhere; this idea that whatever it is they’re going through is somehow trivial and not as meaningful as they think. 

I know what it is to go through a phase, as many of us do. I loved Bros when I was 14. Like, I really loved them. I’d stay awake at night and listen to the Bros Front fan cassette on my personal stereo over and over. I drew pictures of them. I wore the lager bottle caps on my shoes. I delighted in Matt’s impersonation of Stevie Wonder on the Des O’Connor show. I mourned Craig. I was in it for life. It lasted for two years. 

I want to say something about phases though, because ‘phase’ can mean a couple of different things. We use it a lot to mean ‘trend’ or something which passes quickly. We imagine that when the craze is over (like Lo Lo Balls. Remember those?) we will quickly return to our lives before the craze happened (albeit with a broken ankle if you had a Lo Lo Ball).

But ‘phase’ can also mean a transition. We talk about the phases of adolescence, or sometimes the government will ‘phase in’ a particular economic change. ‘Phase’ here meaning those periods which have certain stages in order to progress towards a particularly altered state. We all know that by the end of adolescence we are changed- we don’t return, thankfully, to how we were before the transition began. We don’t know exactly how we’ll turn out, what twists or turns there might be as we discover who we are, but we do know that one phase ends and another begins- that we don’t have a ‘reset’ button- life changes us and our human journey is one of changes which don’t really ever stop.

In Doctor Who the Doctor might have regenerated into a woman now, and people will remind us, ‘She is still the essential Doctor though’, and this might be true, but it will also be true that being a woman will change the Doctor. She will never not have been a woman again, if we can cope with the timey wimey grammar. It’s complicated, but that’s OK.

If you’re wondering what all this has to do with my writing, then I can tell you that it has everything to do with it. I spend a lot of time thinking about characters before I ever write down a note about them, and right now I have this little thought in my head- something, somebody, in a phase, changing… It’s probably going to be different to what I’ve written before. The essential author will still be there, though. But it will be a change and, I hope, a development.

I don’t know what it is about us humans that we resist the phases of our own and one another’s lives. Sometimes I think I do it more than others, but I’m trying to be more aware of the tendency. One of my favourite verses by William Blake is with me as I try to let things and people and myself move freely in and out of phases.

He who binds to himself a joy

Doth the winged life destroy

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity’s sunrise

So I suppose I am writing in praise of phases today, whether in fictional characters or the people who make them up, or in our own characters or bodies, which change all the time. Maybe we can learn to embrace the changes. If not it is our loss really, because we know the changes will keep on happening. Play us out, St Bowie.