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.

News Had Just Come Over... Sheena Wilkinson

I had to phone someone, so I picked on you…

I didn’t phone anyone. Who would I phone?

There was no shortage of people to engage with – the internet was full of tributes, songs, videos, sweet spacey cartoons. His death was the top story on every news programme. I could have had a lovely Bowie-wallow of the sort I could only have dreamed of when I was fifteen.

But I didn’t. I kept away. I didn’t post anything. I didn’t click on any of the videos. I didn’t add my voice to any of the tributes.

Because I’d have been embarrassed to tell the truth: that this felt personal, and painful, in a way that no other famous death ever has, and probably never will again.

David Bowie shouldn’t have been my first obsession. It was the mid-eighties, the wrong time. But I’d found some of my stepfather’s old records and had fallen in love. One Saturday I bumped into a classmate at Caroline Music in Belfast. She was buying a Duran Duran single. I had finally saved up enough for Station To Station (1976). ‘I can’t believe you’re buying a ten-year-old record!’ she sneered. ‘People will be listening to David Bowie when nobody remembers Duran Duran,’ I said. ‘Aye right,’ she said, and on Monday the whole of IVA was laughing at me.

But we found each other, the way people did, and then it was OK. They were in the year below. Four girls cool enough, like me, to risk being uncool. Hours in each other’s bedrooms, copying down lyrics, pouring over NME just in case there was a mention of him that week. There may have been scrapbooks. There was certainly poster-kissing.

And then The Man Who Fell To Earth. 

Two hours of him being unearthly and doomed in a film. Almost too delicious to bear. The trouble was finding it. No YouTube; no Netflix; no next-day-delivery from Amazon. But one of us – not me – had a VHS video recorder at home, and there were video libraries. How hard could it be?

Very hard. We trawled the video libraries of Belfast, dodgy places full of eighties blockbusters and seventies horror and porn. Hardly any had a ten-year-old cult sci-fi film called The Man Who Fell To Earth. There was a sighting in a southern suburb… but it turned out to be a Betamax tape.

Then! We found it in an especially dingy shop in Smithfield. I had to join the video library. This involved bringing in my mum to sign something. She looked horrified, but she knew it was important. Not a god-awful small affair to me. 

By the time we got to see the film we were nearly past ourselves. I have never watched it since, though I could watch it right now, if I wanted. It’s just a click away.  

Maybe that’s partly why yesterday was so hard. It was all just a click away. Too much. When I was fifteen, and everything was so elusive and hard to find, I used to imagine this day, when it would be, what I would be doing, if we would get together to mourn, if we would all still be friends.

We aren’t, though there was never a falling out, just a growing up and away. One of us died. Two of us are in occasional FB contact. Yesterday, the only person whose post I could bear to engage with was one of them. She sent me a private message, saying how shocked she was at how sad she felt. It was the sweetest relief, just like finding her and the others had been thirty years ago, when I was the weird girl with the seventies albums.

What has this got to do with writing for young adults? 

Everything.