K.J.HERITAGE

June 25, 2017June 25, 2017 K.J. Heritage

K.J.Heritage is a UK author of mystery/crime sci-fi and epic fantasy—all with a strong emphasis on action and adventure and occasionally a little humour. Find out more

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Jules Hardisty shared Emlyn Pearce's post to the group: Mostly K.J.Heritage.

4 days ago

When I heard that a woman had been cast as Dr Who, I didn’t shit my pants, or explode in a gigantic fireball of fragile masculinity, or go on Twitter to make some rape threats, or lock myself in a room to wonder why my balls are looking smaller and more bloodless by the day.

No, none of that. My first thought was about the real, human woman doctors I know, and the two things they all have in common with the new Dr Who.

I thought about three of my school friends: Dr McKinnell, a philosopher who spent recently spent several patient hours explaining eco-feminism to me in a pub in Durham; Dr Over, a psychologist who studies the origin of prejudice in children, and Dr Corrigan, a marine ecologist specialising in speciation (try saying that after a few pints. I did; I failed horribly).

I thought of my university friend Dr Edwards, who not only goes on Women’s Hour to talk about martian science fiction, but put herself at the cutting edge of democratising education by co-founding the Open Library of Humanities; I thought of my cousins, Debbie and Nat, who help children as a neurologist and a psychologist respectively, and my friend Dr Thornborrow who would be my first pick to put me back together in a medical emergency.

I thought of the women I know who are, as we speak, moving towards the conclusion of their PhDs: the future Dr Jones, who moved to the far side of the globe so that she could finish her PhD about media bias in the era of fake news; the future Dr St Claire, whose research into urban farming might just provide us all with the more sustainable future we so urgently need, and the future Dr Robinson-West, who is well on her way to becoming a world expert on the anthropology of sport.

These women might have excelled across very different disciplines, but they all have two things in common with the new Dr Who:

Firstly, they are all adventurers.

You have to have an adventurous spirit to complete a PhD: you must travel to the very edge of human knowledge and then leap off into research that nobody has ever done before. It is a terrifying prospect.

Completing a PhD is time-consuming, laborious, difficult, with scant or illusive rewards at the end of it all. You need to be ambitious, and self-confident, and single-minded, and have lots of other attributes that we aren’t always good at recognising and encouraging in women.

The second thing they have in common with the new Dr Who is that they have all had people assume by their title that they must be a man.

They have had their own banks or utility suppliers refer to them as ‘Mrs’ and ask to speak to their husband; they have been introduced by their first name at academic conferences while men are referred to with their proper academic title; they have been assumed to be their own wife, or a nurse, or a secretary, or one of their own students.

They have each had their extraordinary achievements dismissed in an instant by those who assume that ‘Mrs’ is still the best title upgrade a little girl can hope for.

That is why Jodie Whittaker’s Dr Who has an importance that goes far beyond Saturday night TV.

Now If I’m honest, I usually don’t give much of a shit about the gender of fictional characters or their portrayers.

In a world where Hamlet himself was played by Fanny Furnival, Charlotte Charke and Sarah Siddons as long ago as the 1700s, and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando was travelling through time and changing genders in the 1920s, it seems incredibly backward and painfully ignorant to get your knickers in a twist about a TV character’s change of gender in 2017.

But this event is important because for so many children, Dr Who is the most prominent Doctor in their life; and because so many people in our society still assume a Doctor must be a man.

As my friend Dr Edwards might say, science fiction is always, at heart, about the era in which it is created, and so Dr Who’s regeneration into a female form says something very exciting about where we’re going in our attitude to female success.

In a few months' time, when Jodie Whittaker’s first episode of Dr Who is broadcast, there might just be a little girl somewhere in Britain doodling in front of the TV.

Maybe she will be designing a spaceport, or sketching the organs of the human body, or maybe she’ll be imagining the furniture that stood in the court of Elizabeth I or pondering the future configuration of continental plates.

Maybe that little girl will glimpse up for just a second or two and see Jodie Whittaker on the screen: Jodie Whittaker the adventurer who is doing what no woman has ever done before; Jodie Whittaker whose gender didn’t stop her from being ambitious, and brave, and a pioneer.

Maybe that little girl will slowly render her own name, in carefully designed letters, as little girls have done for centuries: and then maybe she will pause, and her brain will flicker, her hand paused, and she will catch a glimpse of Jodie Whittaker, kicking some Dalek butt beyond a door she always thought was locked, and she will slowly write those two little letters - Dr - in front of her own name.

Perhaps that little girl will cock her head to one side and then to the other, swinging her feet in the air the way that kids do - just to try it out, just to test the title’s fit beside her own familiar name - and she will start to consider what kind of adventures she might be able to go on.

Because when Jodie Whittaker gets in that Tardis she will be doing what hundreds of women doctors are doing every day: she will be moving us towards a fairer, freer world where a person’s value is measured not by their gender, but by their talents, their skills, and the content of their character.

It will be by far the most heroic thing that any Dr Who has ever done. ... See MoreSee Less

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