The first was when Missy said “when the Doctor was a little girl” in her “guess which one is wrong” sequence and the second was when someone (I think it was the Doctor or Missy) called the weird snake guy a “man in a dress”.
The first one is using transness as a punchline and the second is playing on transmisogynist ideas about trans women while also using transness as a punchline.
- C
I was also interested in what the jokes where and I saw after the episode that there was a lot of celebration for the possiblity of missys line being a reference to a genderfluid doctor. I’m not disagreeing with you, I just wondered whether you had seen the same types of response
Moffat has been pretty negative about the idea of a Doctor played by a woman in the past, although now he seems to have changed his mind from thinking it’s a terrible thing to thinking it’s something that could vaguely happen at some point, e.g. from here:
I wanted to cast Peter Capaldi. If there is any other player on the board other than the person who excited you the most in the role, “Doctor Who” would go off the air, so that’s what you have to do. Was the time right? I don’t know. I think it would have been a disaster if we’d cast a female Doctor when David [Tennant] left. I believe. Disaster. Possible, this time. I think I should get a little more credit for being the only person who’s made it possible. [Laughs.] It wasn’t part of the fiction of the show until I wrote it. And I keep establishing it. But I think when that day comes — whatever showrunner that is — then the BBC will say, “Tell me how this is definitely going to work.” Because, I tell you, there are two venomous packs here. A lot of people in the middle, sensible enough to say, “If it’s good, I’ll like it; if it’s not good, I won’t like it.”
I’m generally skeptical of the “when the time’s right” agument for representation because the time never seems to be right (this isn’t just a Moffat problem, it seems pretty universal: unless writers say they want representation right now, it tends not to happen), and he’s dancing around the idea and insulting it a lot, so I wouldn’t recommend getting your hopes up.
On the other hand, if you skim over the sexism in the article he seems to be vaguely aware that (a) he should have more characters of colour and (b) that women are intimidated by “boys’ clubs”, so I think he is actually becoming a little more aware of things. And apparently he’s in favour of quotas now, which I wasn’t expecting.
(I’d like to think it’s the charming influence of SH and me, but he’d probably disagree. And I’m guessing we’d be one of the venemous packs demanding a female Doctor for the sake of it.)
So I think it’s very unlikely that this is the sign of a genderfluid Doctor, but it isn’t the first time that a genderfluid Time Lord has been mentioned (thanks to Neil Gaiman), and it could later be used as justification for a genderfluid Doctor.
And I noticed that there were more people of colour in the latest episode than there were last time I watched Doctor Who (but then he killed half of them, so that undermined this somewhat).
- C