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.

Zwarte Piet and other companions. By Keren David

First let me apologise it the following image offends you.

And now let me apologise if my previous apology offended you.

If you were offended by my first apology then you are almost certainly Dutch and will instantly recognise the picture as Sinterklaas -  Saint Nicholas -  parading through Amsterdam with Zwarte Piet ('Black Pete') his...well, how shall we describe him? His servant possibly, but generally, nowadays, referred to as his companion, helper or friend.   Remember those gollywog toys that you used to see on jam pots, in toy shops and in Enid Blyton books? They live on in Zwarte Piet -  or Pieten - hundreds of whom  accompany the Sint (as he is known) on his parade (they arrive by boat, supposedly from Spain), blacked up with afro wigs and bright red lips. In the sweet shops there are marzipan Piets, in department stores huge Piet models climb up and down ropes.

 When we first went to live in the Netherlands we found Zwarte Piet startling (and I have never forgotten the face of my friend from Boston when she visited me in the maternity ward of an Amsterdam hospital and bumped into a six foot Piet handing out presents to  children. 'They'll never believe this in America!' she shrieked, pulling out her camera). But gradually, we got used to him. Our children were growing up there, and Sinterklaas was an accessible bit of Dutch culture, with easy songs and cute customs  (you leave out your shoe overnight and Piet fills it with sweets and chocolate and takes the carrot you've left out for the Sint's horse).  We bought them Zwarte Piet hats - shiny satin and feather plumes -  but never blacked them up. And we didn't buy Zwarte Piet marzipan sweets either. My daughter called him Smart Piet. We loved him like the Dutch.

There are always rumblings of discontent in the Netherlands about Zwarte Piet, with black people complaining that he is an offensive image, but they are rarely taken very seriously, with most Dutch people -  liberal, sure, but white -  pointing out that he is a much-loved part of their culture, and besides, the blackness comes from the chimneys that he slides down to distribute sweets. This year the protests have got louder, with a UN committee criticising the custom.  The Dutch Prime Minister commented  "Black Piet, the name says it already. He's black. I can't change much about that." Social media pages in support of Piet drawing huge support for the old customs.

I thought of Zwarte Piet this week,when I considered a venerable British cultural figure. Doctor Who has been a part of the British childhood for fifty years. I cowered behind the sofa as the Daleks attacked in the 1970s and my children did the same thirty or so years later.

Like the Sint, the Doctor has always been white and male, and he has a younger, more naive companion. In  the Doctor's case the companion is nearly always a woman. There has been much talk about changing the Doctor's form each time he regenerates into another form -  could he be played by a black man? Could he be a woman? - but such a radical step has never been tried.  The Doctor is male, the companions are women. That's how it's always been.

  The BBC has form in repressing women's voices, as an excellent series on Radio Four revealed recently. Bosses were cautious and reluctant to hire women to read the news, because their voices were not considered to have sufficient authority. As late as 1973  the BBC issued a report about women in broadcasting  stating that "women's vulnerability to menopausal tension"would limit their careers. And forty years later it is still unacceptable for a woman to be considered as Doctor Who.  It's as though the Doctor's authority would disappear if he were to be reborn with the shape of Sandi Toksvig, say, or Sophie Okonedo.

The white maleness of the Doctor goes beyond the faces you see on the screen. There has not been a female scriptwriter on the show since 2007. Some of the books written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary have been written by women (Jenny Colgan, Naomi Alderman) but the majority are by men. And a collection written by leading children's writers  appearing month by month throughout the year online and now collected together as a book -  has only two women writers - Richelle Mead, the US fantasy writer, and Malorie Blackman, our revered children's laureate.

 Now, all due respect to the fabulous male writers involved (Neil Gaiman, Philip Reeve, Michael Scott, Eoin Colfer, Alex Scarrow, Charlie Higson, Derek Landy and Patrick Ness) but really? Really? Nine to two? Only one British woman (alongside three Irish men)? What about Michelle Paver, Susan Cooper, Susan Price? How about Meg Rosoff, Sophie McKenzie, Theresa Breslin, Katherine Langrish, Gillian Philip?  Were they asked? Did they say no? How about J K Rowling? Is she high profile enough?  The writers chosen represent a 'Who's Who of children's literature,' according to the publishers, Puffin. Hang on, I thought women were well represented in children's literature. Clearly I was mistaken.

The YA author James Dawson brought up the topic on Twitter this week, writing:

So only 2 out of 11 of the Doctor Who 50th short stories were written by women. That’s actually a bit shoddy.

Fellow author Jane McLoughlin shot back her reply:

Yes, but I'm sure women assisted the male writers or acted as companions...

 I'd like to see a black or female Sinterklaas. I'd like the next Doctor Who to be something different -  it could be a Dalek, if they don't think a woman would be suitable. I want to challenge our traditional cultural assumptions about who is in authority and who is a helper. And I'd like to see commissioning editors thinking beyond male writers, however dazzling their talent!