Doctor WHAT!?

As with last time, I decided that I was going to try to avoid any Doctor Who related news so as to be genuinely in the moment when Capaldi finally regenerates and shows us his next self. Three seconds after making this decision, the internet became a blazing inferno of people screaming about the Doctor being a woman.

Annoyed, but resolute, I soldiered on, certain I could do my usual internet stuffs without stumbling into any depictions of just who, exactly, this new "guy" is or what she looks like. "Good luck", forewarned my roommate with a prescient tone that conveyed both his amusement at my inevitable failure and the weary frustration of having obviously been bashed over the head with the news multiple times already.

"Psshh!". I noised, more resolute than ever to make it to Krimbo without seeing one glimpse of her face. And then I refreshed my Facebook feed to see this as the very first loaded post:

Thanks, "friend".

So with the catfighting out of the bag, I surrendered to curiosity and watched the teaser of her introduction, and took some time to digest my thoughts on the matter.

I am not happy.

I am not happy for several reasons, but the biggest reason is resonant to the emotional response *you* just probably had to me saying I am not happy, and this is something we will get to in time. Oh believe me, we will get there.

My more ruminated conclusions about this response fall less under the purview of what some have inelegantly argued to be "tradition", than "consistency". The Doctor is an ever-changing flower, constantly blooming in new colours. We know this. But the essence of what he is - the FLOWER remains consistent. Across all forms, there are aspects to his personality that remains the same.

Through all of his changing personas and switching quirks, there are consistencies that make the Doctor, fundamentally, what he is. Aspects that keep him the quintessential "Doctor".The question is... is there a "maleness" about that entity, or am I unknowingly imposing my own perspective onto an abstract? This is something I have experienced before.

We are, thankfully, entering an age of more ubiquitous acceptance of Transgender individuals, to the point where it is not at all uncommon for anyone to know someone who has transitioned. The first time I encountered such a situation was several years ago. A very old and dear friend of mine confessed, with a certain heart-breaking self-deprecation, that "he" was really a she.

Being no stranger to alternative lifestyles, I didn't hesitate to accept her as she really was, however I also promised to be honest with her about how I felt as we continued to discuss it. The first thing I noticed was a stark change in her personality. She seemed more open, happier, but also just very, very different from the "man" I had known. This left me with an odd cognitive dissonance.

You see, her personality changed so drastically that I couldn't help but feel she was a stranger to me now. A stranger I was happy to know, and to continue getting to know, but still. What had happened to the guy I *used* to know? I understood, intellectually, that "he" was a mask, a false persona she wore in part to deflect suspicions about her true self. I get that.

But that was the persona I had gotten to know. That was the one I was friends with. I had no issues about her changing, and I wanted her true personality to come to the surface without obstruction. I just couldn't help feeling like I didn't recognize that guy in her anymore. I had gained a friend, but also lost one, even if the one I lost was never real to begin with. Was it right to mourn that? I *honestly* don't know. But I did.

So with that in mind, I do know what that cognitive dissonance feels like. To suddenly find that someone you know is a different gender. To feel that they just don't "work" as that gender, because what you have gotten to know is so different. This is what people are trying to articulate when they say "The Doctor has always been male, it's tradition". They're trying to say "This is how it has always been, and it made sense that way". In other words, changing it now takes something away from that history, it makes it, retroactively, not make sense anymore.

But of course, the difference between my example and this, is the Doctor is NOT putting on his personality. It's not a disguise, it's simply who he is. And IS there a maleness to that character? I think there is. And before you start shouting sexist from the rooftops, yes I know that females can hold any of the same personality traits as males and vice versa. This isn't about what CAN be, it's about what IS. And there ARE general differences between how males and females behave (otherwise the entire concept of being transgender would be rendered meaningless, right?)

It's not just machismo, either. I am not lauding his strength, sense of duty or vigour as a manly sort of thing. I'm saying that The Doctor is Father Time. He is an old, wise man who has watched the human race struggle to walk from infancy and watches them run about with kind and knowing eyes. He's seen a lot, and he's seen it all from a male perspective. Which isn't to say that he couldn't benefit in new and interesting ways from a female perspective, but all of that collective experience *reinforces* that male perspective, for both him and fans of the show. I mean if you woke up in the body of the opposite sex tomorrow, would you just toddle on with your day, assuming that role?

I know his persona changes when he regenerates, but as I have argued, SOME parts of it remain the same, and they are paternal, masculine, even somewhat human. If we change him THAT drastically, are we not simply removing from that character the essence of what he is? Does the show not become something else entirely?

And yes, I know they've been setting it up in a really sort of contrived and forced manner by doing the other Timelord male to female regenerations. Which isn't to say I am not in love with the Mistress, who isn't?! Michelle Gomez is *AMAZING*. But it's clearly just the new "deadlock seal" or "Screwdriver can't do wood" of the show. Brand new rule introduced that was somehow now always there but never mentioned before. I am not a fan of that sort of writing, it lacks grace.

Instead of jamming a retcon into a script, why not point out some old inconsistency (Like the 2nd Doctor remembering things that happened immediately before his regeneration in The Five Doctors) and THEN write in a retcon that EXPLAINS it, and looks planned from the start. They teased such an idea with the Hybrid plotline, harkening to the Doctor's possible human heritage mentioned by number 8. THAT is good writing. More of that, less of the "SUDDENLY all timelines go out of sync when we meet ourselves and thus inconsistencies are magically erased" rubbish.

But I digress (sometimes violently), forced retconning aside, the fact that the Doctor can change sexes is not a point of contention from a mythology standpoint, as it is a feeling that the character we have gotten to know for so many years, those aspects of him that remained consistent, simply don't suit a feminine form. He's Father Time, not Mother Nature. And I have nothing against the latter, they are both very fine archetypes, but they are *different* by essence of themselves, and this is what makes the new Doctor feel wrong.

All of that being said, while I find it to be not to my personal taste, I am okay with the decision. I am curious to see where they go with it, and it's definitely going to be an intriguing footnote of his journey through time, sure to be referenced often by future Doctors to the dumbstruck faces of his future companions. I'm okay with something wildly different and new happening, and I think it could be healthy for the show to get shaken up in that way. I want to see what they manage to build out of these new pieces, and I'm sure I will greedily gobble up every last scrap of Whittaker's screen time they toss me.

But there is still the issue of that "main" reason I am not happy about this. And that's you. Ya bastard.

Specifically, those of you who were sharpening your pitchforks the second I said I wasn't happy. I am sick to the goddamned backteeth of people who are just mobs looking for something to be outraged about. Now the Doctor is female, if ANYONE doesn't like ANYTHING she does, they are just going to get branded a "misogynist" and will have to shout over a crowd of angry idiots just to continue their thought. Remember that dreadful Ghostbusters movie with the all-female cast? It was clearly TERRIBLE. Unfunny, unimaginative and just plain dumb, but the feminists crucified anyone who dared to say it.

And that's going to be the way of things until this nonsense ends. Some people get so used to being warriors that they don't know how to stop fighting. You fight for equality, and when the world finally gives in to your point of view, suddenly you realise that your whole identity is raging against a machine that no longer gives a fuck about stopping you. So what do you do? You bottle up all those feelings like a grenade of pure wrath and you just fling it at the first person who says ANYTHING even vaguely connected to the topic that was once your battlefield. And in the end, does this help us to BATTLE divisiveness, or just make us more divided?

As of this moment, the world of Who will become a senseless battleground with teeth-grinding women and their shining white knights marching beneath a burning bra on one side. and the depraved army of trolls who exist just to rile up anyone who is easy to rile up on the other side, with a little island of seven dudes who actually hold the sexist views that the hysterically angry want everyone to think so they can justify their hysterical anger. The rest of us? We're just the casualties.

I was in disbelief when I read the comments of the reveal video to see many thousands of threads that have already been created by people who are furiously lecturing the "sexists" for how wrong and stupid they are for being so opposed to this change. And then get further confused as I kept looking to see who they are arguing with and find. Nothing. THERE. They were arguing with NO ONE.

By now, however, the mere presence of feminists ranting about this has only begun attracting anti-feminists at this point who are just ranting about feminism itself, not the issue of the Doctor's gender. Meanwhile, the few trolls are chuckling like Muttley as they detonate every thread with remarks designed to provoke. Trolls, by virtue of being trolls, tend to have the loudest and most obnoxious voice in the room. They are self-designed to look big and representative of whatever group they are imitating to goad a reaction.

But the people who ACTUALLY care about this are far fewer in number, and the ones who are bothered for genuinely sexist reasons are even fewer. And I'm not even annoyed at them, they're the spiders of the Web, you expect such people. It's everyone else who is pissing me off, and tainting an otherwise harmless, even if ill-advised, in my opinion, story twist with a toxic atmosphere of rage and idiocy.

I'm annoyed, not because of the decision, but because people are too stupid to be trusted with their own stupid opinions. And now everything Who related is going to be charged and overdramatized and the ratings may suffer, who knows how bad it will get? It could even lead to the cancellation of the show. All I know is, boring old normal people like me won't be able to so much as voice a dissenting opinion on the matter without having to construct a stupidly long blog post explaining in very clear detail where we are actually coming from, and most people aren't dumb enough to waste their time on something so asinine.

As for me, my tiny little nugget of text will have to suffice, and despite not LIKING this change (if you recall, I said the exact same thing about Capaldi, and boy was I wrong) I look forward to being proved wrong again. I hope the writer's knock this out of the park, I really do. As a writer myself I am already imagining new and interesting scenarios. Girltalk with the Mistress, the Doctor meeting up with and slowly falling for a male version of the Corsair, despite knowing he will eventually die. Imagine what a more feminine take on the TARDIS interior would be like? The possibilities are endless.

But please, guys, let's not overdo it, okay? Just the one female Doctor. I'm happy to embrace change, but I don't want to build my home there. The Doctor is male, and as far as I am concerned, HE (which is not an attack on gender expression, merely an affirmation of my own interpretation of this particular mythology) is just going through a phase. I'm interested to see that phase, but I think I speak for many fans when I say, as at least a general rule - keep the Doctor male. I really do believe that is intrinsic to his nature.

And if you have a problem with that, I'll send you a sonic screwdriver of your very own, and tell you where to stick it. People are entitled to their own preferences, and it doesn't have to come from a place of hate. STOP being a mob first and a person second.

Later.

Otherkin and Transgenderism

A while ago, a friend of mine vlogged about misanthropy, identifying humanity as something so depraved and decadent that it can only do harm, while also admitting that he was part of the problem. However, he acknowledged only that he was part of the same race that causes the problem, not that he was in any way responsible for it. But at the same time, he was seized with a terrible guilt and impotence at how powerless he was to escape it.

In his mind, he was cursed with a self-hatred, in the sense that he despises his own race and feels trapped by it. I should clarify, this person identifies as an Otherkin. This is still quite a taboo and misunderstood topic that people love to jump all over, and I've been saddened in recent weeks to see people who I admire make arguments that seem to tear down other people for identifying as such, however I have a good few friends who identify as Otherkin, and more than a few Transgender friends as well, and in my mind they are very much in the same situation.

You can debate about how a person can know they are a different species in their head, what that means, whether it can be regarded as psychologically valid, how it works or whatever... but those same debates have been happening for decades about transgender people. Thus I've been particularly surprised to see certain popular members of the Youtube transgender community expressing their disapproval at being equated by their critics to furies and Otherkin (which are not the same thing by the way) as though this were a truly offensive reduction.

I find this sad. If a person feels trapped in their own body, that's valid. It doesn't NEED to be valid to anyone but them, and as long as they feel those emotions truly, it IS valid. For someone who knows exactly what that feels like, and who likely has to cope with a great deal of prejudice directed at them for it on a daily basis, I would expect a higher level of understanding about how painful this can be.

With that same sentiment in mind, hearing my Otherkin friend lament his distaste for his own humanity and how terrible his born species is compared to what he aspires to be, I was reminded of another, far more touchy conversation I once had with a transgender friend a long time ago. This friend of mine had said to me that she will never be a "real" woman, she will always have to carry the title of trans and would never quite be genuine. There was such a defeatist tone to what she was saying, or perhaps a fear of hope. I found this level of self-contempt to be appaling and distressing.

I explained to her that being born without breasts and the right plumbing does not make her any less a woman than a natural born woman who loses those body parts in a terrible accident. I explained that there is nothing inherently fake about her just because she was, for all intents and purposes, born with a genetic condition that gave her the wrong body, which in my opinion is the better way of looking at it. Unfortunately, she wouldn't listen to me. Maybe her opinion is more valid than mine, I can't know without being trasngendered myself. But I can imagine that living with the title of "fake" hanging over your head your whole life must be extremely depressing, and I simply don't agree that it belongs there.

So when I saw this Otherkin friend of mine, hating his humanity just as my other friend had resigned herself to being a less valid version of what she wanted to be based on how she was born, I felt compelled to say something about it. I'm sure I would have his permission in sharing what I said to him with you, as it gave me a much needed opportunity to get some thoughts off my chest that had been bouncing around in my head for a long time. This is what I said, and I'm not just speaking to him... but to all people:


Humanity has a very precious, special gift, one that comes with a tremendous burden. You might call it a blessing with a curse. We're self aware, introspective. We're capable of intelligent reasoning, curiosity, deduction - the ability to look at this world and want to know more about it.

And when you give something the ability to question, the first thing it will question is itself.

Think about that, just allow yourself to simmer over the incredible, monumental consequences of this simple gift. We're given the hands which can create or destroy as a god, and tongues to convey our thoughts, and yet seemingly there is no purpose for either. so we use our hands to dig our way to the truth, our tongues to forever question why - and never do we get an answer.

The consequence of having this born enlightenment is that we are capable of questioning the negative as well as the positive, and it is an unfortunate fact of nature that pain leaves scars while pleasure is fleeting. We're forever locked in this mentality of fixating on what has happened to us and why, and all that ever sticks with us is the bad.

This traps us in a downward spiral of depression and yes, selfishness too. We're forced to be introspective, selfish by default but this is not a bad thing. In nature morality doesn't even exist, and the only loyalty is that which continues your own species, so selfishness is not in and of itself a purely bad thing. It just means that your self is your primary concern, and when you are locked in your own thoughts as we are, this is inevitable.

The problem is it brings out the worst in us because deep down we're not all that much more evolved than lesser animals. It is, as I have said many times in the past, as though we happened across the tools of god, and had no understanding of how to use them.

The same primitive, primal, feral nature which so many bleeding heart spiritualists revere in the comparative harmony of animals, is what drives humanity to such madness. We have these natural, predatory beasts forever raging against the cages of our minds. Our sense of social warmth and conscience which so many people seem to believe does not exist is what forces us to bottle this up to hide it from everyone else.

So take a guess as to what happens when you try to throw the beast in a cage? I think you know all too well, we’ve all been there. Now intensify that by thousands of years of intensive oppression with no outlet, and apply it to the sheer scale of a global conscience and you have some idea of the effects it must have on society. This insidious bestial nature begins to seep through the cracks in civilized culture with venomous results, festering in the heart of every good deed.

We seek outlets such as religion, politics, business, even sport as a means to allow those predators some exercise without feeling ashamed, applying ourselves ignorantly to doctrinal obsessions that allow us to justify the rage we try so hard to unnaturally burry. It is, in fact, our eternal struggle to be good that forces us to burry this dark side and forces it to worm its way back out through our actions.

To put it another way, negativity feeds negativity. The self-loathing and insecurity which we are all plagued with, you included, me included, is the result of this feral fury turned inwards, the septic animal organ imploded and rotting our souls to the core because we try so hard to rise above it. And with every blow our egos take as a result, we fall down another level.

Every bruise stays with us forever, every kiss forgotten the moment it leaves our lips. The animal within only knows how to howl in pain because it has been cursed with this self-awareness and then given no direction, forcing it to wonder alone in the cold with its first emotion being the agony of birth into a dangerous and scary world of sheer powerlessness - a true original sin that taints the rest of its life.

The scars lead to resentment, the resentment causes habit, the habit governs what is perceived as truth. This downward spiral continues faster and faster, the negativity we feel doubling back on itself eternally - an ironic double helix of resentment both inward and outward that permeates the very fabric of this species and corrupts it from within.

But... just as sure as there is this self-perpetuating negativity everywhere, so too is there proof of the good in humanity.

After all, is it not true that nearly 7 billion people walk the earth this very moment? That's 7 billion individual lives, many if not most of whom may be suffering, yes, but seven BILLION nonetheless. And how did they get here? A union of love. Albeit sometimes rape, and often frivolous, nevertheless is there any better way to enter this world than through love?

Seven billion people, and how did they get here? How are they still here? Because someone cared for them.

Unlike the admirable power of the deer which walks mere moments after birth, or the resilient crocodile, unlike the cannibalistic mammals that practise sibling rivalry, the wily fish spawn that flee for their lives moments after birth or the determined terrapin that battles heroically to reach the water - unlike all of them, human babies are born helpless, powerless.

We fall out of our mothers as little more than soft balls of noisy meat on a string with absolutely no way to protect ourselves, no way to feed ourselves, very little in the way of survival instincts and zero physical strength. And yet... seven billion people, seven BILLION are alive today, right now, because someone cared for them. Someone protected them.

Seven billion testaments to the virtues of humanity, the good inside all of us. for while we may not be the best mothers and fathers, while we may fail as parents, sometimes horribly, sometimes in less obvious ways, while we are all imperfect guides and mentors we do, as a general rule, at least *try*. For at one time or another, all seven billion of us had to have been cared for by at least one other person.

Then, consider how people pull together during times of crisis. The earthquake in Haiti, the rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, the ongoing cleanup after the Tsunami, hell even the war in Iraq, while initiated dishonestly and carried out abominably, was only green lit because people had the best of intentions at heart. Thousands of people are out there elbow deep in filth and broken glass trying to help other people for no other reason than they choose to be.

Think of all the doctors and nurses, the carers and teachers, counsellors, therapists, police, firemen and social workers - the people who could have chosen any job but they all chose to do one that involves taking on other people burdens, putting up with the stress that other people deal with while the rest of us can barely handle our own. These are the people I have the most respect for, and they are the crucial backbone of any society without which it would fall apart.

There is proof everywhere you look of the ongoing good in humanity, you just have to see it with fresh eyes. To shrug off the habits of focussing on the lingering pains in order to gain new appreciation for the things you take for granted every day. Consider how far we've come from just a couple of centuries ago.

We remember every bruise, and forget every kiss, but each play an important factor in building up who we are as individuals. And if you are someone who can see the flaws in how we do things, then humanity needs YOU to help us fix them. Because it is only when those who can, do, that anything gets done. Every individual has that power.

Remember, negativity feeds negativity. Nothing constructive ever came from just hating the way things are, by simply resenting humanity you are only contributing to the choking climate that keeps them mentally subdued and fixated on failure. You're not superior, nor are you inferior, because what you see is the same as what we all see, and it's not going to change until we all start doing something about it.

We are above the animals, insomuch as we have the potential to take life a step further and make this world shine. Nature gave us that gift, the gift to understand what we do wrong, to question, and ultimately, to do. So my advice to you is, don't just hate the madness you see, to do so is to waste that beautiful gift and to squander it in the same way as those you hate. Use your power, be selfish, save your own race.





Bringing this back to the original topic for a moment, I would like to add that while making peace with the being you were born as is very important, there is no reason to abandon the being you feel you are inside. I think this sense of isolation from one's true self is something we can all relate to in one sense or another. We all want to be something... rich, heroic, popular... loved. We don't always get that chance. It is important we can still look in the mirror and love the person we see... but never stop chasing your dreams either.

Dreams like that are what add new flavours to the mix of life, creating new experiences and points of view, an entire new substance in the make-up of the human experience that will bring more enjoyment of life to the next generation. There is no need to shy away from something just because it is different... if we haven't learned that by now, we never will. Don't be afraid of your dreams, no matter how strange. They are what keeps the world turning.

All the best, my friends.