Breath on a Mirror
It’s rare that I delve into cultural or media studies, but given the most recent inclusion of a transgender woman on Dr. Who (I won’t say more to avoid spoilers), I wanted to take a detour into something that’s been a consistent but evolving theme throughout my life with respect to my transition. Aside from the obvious fact that the doctor does indeed change gender through a process I’ll describe later, I see an allegory beside the obvious metaphor. For me, the Doctor is a person who makes impossible choices to get as close as possible to the person the Doctor wants to be, while changing so dramatically that others see them as a different people throughout different periods of their lives. They maintain the same formative experiences and memories, and essentially hold the same same values as before. Meanwhile, their bodies change dramatically as does how the world sees them, reacts to them and interprets their existence.
Regeneration
For the uninitiated, Doctor Who faced a bit of a bit of a crisis as a show in 1966 when it lost its main actor, despite being enormously and outrageously successful. Rather than cancel the show, and since Doctor Who is based on someone who in addition to being a time traveler is an extraterrestrial, a “regeneration” process was built into the mythology of the show that could account for dramatic shifts in personality and appearance while maintaining the same character.
Regeneration can be thought of almost like expedited reincarnation, wherein the body breaks down into its base properties and reassembles into a slightly different shape, with a new personality to match. Rather than through total annihilating death and rebirth at year zero, the same person is reincarnated in the same body after an extreme makeover.
Just prior to my transition, I was working an incredibly difficult and taxing job that took up nearly all of my time and energy. I would come home enormously depleted, doing most of my work as a trauma therapist and working in the context of addiction, intergenerational violence and sexual trauma. And as such, no part of me wanted to do as I’d done in previous iterations of my life, which was to watch police procedurals. I’d grown up an avid X-Files fan, and science fiction had been a true comfort to me stretching back to my single digit years.
Doctor Who was an escape I came to late, after my first grad school, during Matt Smith’s tenure on the show (I’ll let you work out how long ago my first graduate program was). In the Doctor I also saw someone who felt extraordinarily familiar. While I was used to people with my assigned sex portraying emotionless caricatures of masculinity, Tennant and Smith’s portrayals showed profound gentleness, playfulness, and oceans of compassion. By this time, I’d already felt that I’d lived many lives and was on the verge of what I knew was an enormous change I mostly refused to accept. I would regularly feel like the world was going to end if I made the exact wrong call in a given safety situation, managing the clinical care of a program that cared for hundreds of families throughout the city. At night, I would drive home and crawl into bed, and watch someone impossibly prevent the annihilation of whole species without using violence. Eventually I put up string lights in my office shaped like the TARDIS, which would light my late nights doing safety-planning and fielding crisis calls.
Rather than simply being a means to solve a difficult casting problem in 1966, regeneration also allows us to conduct thought experiments into what it means to be a human being. Regeneration poses an interesting question, which is at which point does one version of ourselves bifurcate and demarcate a new one.
Jodie Whittaker’s 13th doctor, whose choice as the next Doctor broke the minds of a lot of very boring people in 2017.
To put it another, hopefully less opaque way, while so many of us regardless of gender modality identify as having lived multiple lives and selves— we are indeed the same continuous person. This is rarely contested outside philosophical debates, and in fact the majority of 20th century psychology and psychiatry relied on the idea that there is an inherent core of our being that continues to be, no matter how much we change and the world changes around us.
Yet for transgender people, the consensus belief in our continual, uninterrupted existence is questioned constantly. When we share with the world who we are, the world decides if it is willing to accommodate the clear fact of existence, often independent of how such accommodation or lack thereof will affect us. Many of us have had someone tell us we are dead to them. Many of us have had to completely uproot our lives and come into fresh settings to start anew. We must constantly beg for the healthcare we need by offering substantial proof that its absence will kill us, and from people who deadpan tell us that they could wish for nothing else. Even in subtle, often benign ways such as by loved ones who hang pictures of us prior to transition in their homes (this is not to dismiss that this action is also often down out of malicious spite, only that it can be done benignly as well.)
In what biologist, feminist theorist and trans icon Julia Serrano calls ungendering in her seminal book Whipping Girl, our existential reality is made secondary to the musings and whims of the cisgender world around us and we are made less-than. Therefore for me it was lifesaving to be able to re-contextualize many of the struggles I was wrestling with, and see them reflected in someone who is an objective albeit complicated protagonist, rather than seeing reflections of ourselves that beg for sympathy and garner shame.
And so it felt like profound synchronicity when during Matt Smith’s final portrayal of the twelfth doctor, he gives the following speech before transforming into Peter Capaldi’s thirteen — all the while remaining the same person at his core and reassuring the person he loves that this will remain true in perpetuity
During a particularly difficult summer, I printed this quote out and taped it to my desk so that I would see it every time I hung my head. As I came out to friends, family and co-workers, I would use it as an achor while the outside world’s reaction to my transition tore some of my most significant relationships apart:
“It all just disappears, doesn’t it? Everything you are, gone in a moment; like breath on a mirror ... We all change, when you think about it, we’re all different people; all through our lives, and that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve gotta keep moving, so long as you remember all the people that you used to be.”
As a therapist, I can’t tell you the number of times this very idea has become the central focus of therapeutic conversations. This is especially true for people who find themselves changed as the result of profound loss. For trans people struggling with loss, it can mean the answer to whether huge chunks of our lives are excised largely against our will, or out of safety and necessity.
Unlike the vast majority of people who would be horrified at such a sudden change away from the familiar that is out of our control and at the apparent mercy of change, the Doctor greets each regeneration with a combination of melancholy and sweetness before excitedly exploring a newly changed body. As trans people, while the world around us perceives and interacts with us as completely differently, we know ourselves to be the same person. And for those of us who choose to medically transition, like regeneration, our transformations are uncertain and in many ways completely out of our control. No matter how many different ways the world wants to destroy us and reduce us to our past, we push on to become.
