'I never did this when I was a man'
- 'I never did this when I was a man'
In summer 2017, the BBC announced that Jodie Whittaker would become the thirteenth Doctor in the Doctor Who series, the first woman to take the role. Precedent had to some extent been set for such a gender change in previous episodes: other characters with the same ability as the Doctor to regenerate-to die and be revived as an apparently different person (whilst remaining, in some fundamental sense, the same person)-had also regenerated as different genders. But, clearly, this was a regeneration of a different order of significance.
The news was met with both outrage and outpourings of enthusiasm.1 Whittaker's first full-episode appearance was in the first of the eleventh series, 'The Woman Who Fell to Earth';2 and perhaps it was in response to the scale of these reactions that the episode somewhat underplays the change: Whittaker's Doctor does not initially realise that she is no longer a man, until a police officer calls her 'Madam'. 'Why are you calling me Madam?' she asks, and the officer replies 'Because you're a woman'. The Doctor replies with excitement: 'Am I? Does it suit me? . . . Oh yeah, I remember! Sorry, half an hour ago I was a white haired Scotsman'. This lack of awareness, however, does not undermine the fact that this is a meaningful shift for the programme, which has, for twelve incarnations of the Doctor, and over fifty years, shied away from allowing anyone other than white cis-men to be its central focus. These men have always been the ones to wield the most power and knowledge in the narratives. Whittaker's thirteenth Doctor thus represented a substantial change in direction, which has had a meaningful, if limited, impact on the show's tone and content. [End Page 107]
'This is the best thing ever. I never did this when I was a man', Whittaker's Doctor cheerfully announces when getting henna tattoos in preparation for a wedding in Punjab in 1947, on the night before the Partition of India (Episode Six, 'Demons of the Punjab'). The Doctor's glee during this experience is evident: she celebrates the benefits of her new gender, and her newfound ability to participate in enjoyable women's activities. We could read a striking cis-gendered element in this, in that the Doctor has immediately, and unequivocally, been permitted access to a women-only space, as well as access to a cis-female politics of representation ('my references to body and gender regeneration are all in jest. I'm such a comedian'). And in Episode Eight, 'The Witchfinders', her outrage at the misogynist practice of burning witches in seventeenth-century Lancashire appears to come very much from a place of guaranteed and assured 'cisterhood'.3 As she complains of the seventeenth-century context, 'These are hard times for women. If we're not being drowned, we're being patronised to death'. That 'we' is another of the many markers of her shared experiences with other women. 'The Witchfinders' episode explores the Doctor's frustration with her gender, but also the community she finds within it. 'Set a woman to catch a woman', she suggests of herself. Being a woman is often a unifying, joyful experience for the newly female Doctor. Although she was previously a man, she is now, in keeping with the tradition of the Doctor's regenerations, in some sense also an entirely new character; in this transformation she has become a completely cis-gendered person-she is not battling against an anti-trans politics that threatens to exclude her. Her femaleness brings her joy: a new gender seems to be another planet for the Doctor to explore with interest and enthusiasm.
'The Witchfinders' episode, however, also introduces us to the ways in which the Doctor finds being a woman frustrating. She here finds herself (for the first time) marginalised and unheard because of her gender: 'Honestly', she says, 'if I were still a bloke, I could get on with the job and not have to waste time defending myself'. As a character long...
