A moment of profound importance, or not
Malcolm Clark at Spiked is very amusing about luxury pronouns.
Remember when Doctor Who was fun? Watching it now is about as much fun as being publicly humiliated at work by some jumped-up nonbinary form-filler from HR who thinks he’s amazing because he’s painted one of his fingernails black.
A good example of this joylessness is a scene in the most recent special, ‘The Star Beast’, which has been treated by right-on broadsheet types as a moment of profound importance. Yet all that happened was a transwoman character – played by transwoman actor Yasmin Finney – lectured the Doctor about pronouns. In a moment of unforgivable Time Lord-cis privilege, the Doctor had assumed a diminutive alien called Beep the Meep used male pronouns. What was he thinking?
Not, we can be pretty confident, of the very longstanding convention of referring to all generalized people (lawyers, voters, workers, students etc) as “he” in the singular, as if males are normal and females are some eccentric aberration.
You can tell how out of touch Doctor Who has now become by the fact its enormously pompous showrunner, Russell T Davies, seemed to think that the new series would shock viewers with its ‘progressive’ radicalism. The only shock was the alien pronoun scene’s patent stupidity.
I mean, why on Earth would the Doctor assume the gender of any alien? He has been encountering aliens with no fixed gender since the 1960s. The Doctor has effectively been asking aliens for their pronouns for nigh on 60 years.
Davies may think he’s blazing a trail with the new series of Doctor Who. But the truth is that gender-bending in science fiction is as old as the frozen hills of Gallifrey. In The War of the Worlds, published 125 years ago, HG Wells regaled us with Martian invaders who reproduced asexually. And hermaphrodites pepper sci-fi, from the work of Philip K Dick to that of Ursula K Le Guin.
It’s a sign of the bubble Davies has blown around his throbbing ego that he thinks the notion of genderfluidity is a jaw-dropper. I hate to break it to Davies, but his central protagonist routinely breaks the laws of actual physics by time travelling. In comparison, breaking the laws of our Earth-based mammalian biology is no biggie.
I do like the image of a bubble blown around a throbbing ego.
Wouldn’t a bubble around a throbbing ego be a condom?
I’m still not sure how that substantively differs from saying that Russians think that books are for girls (because книга is feminine) or that the Irish think girls are male (because cailín is masculine).
and then some language have one pronoun for he she & it.
Too bad none of the proposals of a few decades ago for a pronoun for a person of unknown sex caught on.
I will add that in the SF stories by Lois McMaster Bujold there is a minority of genetically engineered hermaphrodites on at least one world. On that world the pronoun for one of them is ‘it’, with no insult implied or taken.
Here’s another great line from the article:
You beat me to the bit about the “throbbing ego”. Heh.
I thought we were now skipping the pronoun talks, and going straight to they-themming individual people without explanation, as was done in season two of Good Omens. Which was particularly noticeable because in season one, everyone including the theoretically-without-reproductive-organs divine and demonic entities were all hes or shes, just like in the Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett novel that was published in 1990. Long before gender identity became a thing (and long before Neil Gaiman spent vast amounts of time on Tumblr amongst the gender-bending pronoun brigade, or former-and-current-Doctor David Tennant had a child identifying as non-binary).
Catwhisperer: That plays into a certain frustration I’ve had. Remember when gay marriage was controversial? Remember when Republican politicians would discover they had homosexual children and changed their stance on the issue? It seems that the lesson people learned from this was that the only reason someone might oppose X is not knowing someone who is/believes/has X. I’m so sick of being asked whether I know anyone who’s transgender. Let’s say I
1) don’t: Is my logic now invalid?
2) do: Is my logic now valid?
Seriously, what the fvck is with this question? It’s the most obvious non sequitur bullshit, and yet people relentlessly deploy it.
I think people ask that question for their own… I don’t know, peace of mind maybe? They assume that you’re not actively evil because we don’t really like to think that badly of people (unless they are total internet strangers). So they think you’re going to come back with “no I don’t” and then they can say “ah but if you only met and talked to a transwoman you would see that they are just normal people and you wouldn’t start an argument with them about TWAW”. After that, the person who asked the question can a) go away feeling they have done a Social Justice and b) doesn’t have to cut all ties with you and purge you from their life, which might be inconvenient for them if they know they have to still have some kind of contact with you. Logic doesn’t come into it, and I can’t imagine what they would say if your answer was “yes I know a handful of trans people. A couple are raging narcissistic woman-hating arseholes, and a couple are perfectly pleasant. I still think all of them are mistaken about this gender business”.