Genderless: Girly Robots and Geek Backlash

Girl robots. Confusing, apparently.

Back in my childhood, The Transformers: The Movie introduced something new and a bit baffling to the Transformers universe. Not that double definite article, although that was a head scratcher, but Arcee, the first (I think, more or less, anyway) female Transformer.

Why should that be confusing? Well, I suspect that it's closely related to the reason why the new Doctor is such a hot button topic for many people. The Transformers, like the Time Lords, are alien beings, and many would argue that they are, effectively, genderless. The thing is, by 'genderless', they – perhaps unconsciously – mean 'all dudes.' I suspect that many of these critics are legitimately weirded out by the fact that suddenly the Transformers are split between boy robots and girl robots(1), but the reason that a female transformer brings this to the fore is that they – that we – had been, consciously or not, screening out the fact that every other Transformer was coded male. Even if we never heard them speak with a male voice they had traditionally masculine proportions – broad chest(2), narrow hips, big arms – if they were largely humanoid, and were universally referred to as 'he' within the narrative.

 

"We're going with pink then?"

It's confusing, people argued, because robots don't have sex. Well, probably not; it's essentially a kids' toy line we're talking about. It's certainly true that, wrecking ball scrota aside, Transformers are as sexless as a Ken doll, but that doesn't mean that they don't have gender. They do, and almost all of them are coded male (12 in 13 in the current Unified Continuity, I believe, reflecting that only one of the 13 Primes was female(3),) both in voice acting and in their physical and character design. What people usually mean by arguing that the originals don't have gender is that, as long as all of the Transformers on screen are coded male, we can kid ourselves that actually no, they're genderless. We just use he for convenience; Optimus Prime isn't a dude(4), honest. As soon as one of them demonstrably isn't a dude, however, all of the others are. A distinction appears on screen and now you can't deny it; they're all dudes, except her.

Strongarm. Not pink.

The other problem in Transformers, of course, is that the original female Autobot was Arcee, who was pink and very, very girly, and basically killed any chance of increasing female representation in the franchise for the next ten years, before Blackarachnia and Airazor made their debuts in Beast Wars. She made a brief appearance in Revenge of the Fallen, in which she was unceremoniously killed off. Outside of the live action movies, female Transformers are becoming more prevalent (at least 1 in 13) and less... femme. Arcee returned in Transformers: Prime as a two-wheeled badass with a heart of gold under a forbidding frown and a crisp, dark blue paint job. She wasn't in the follow up, Robots in Disguise, but that had Strongarm, a tough and eager, if somewhat by the book, cadet with a much more conventional Autobot frame, including four wheels, angular body panels and those narrow, gunfighter hips, and just a hint of lippy (and a female voice actor) to code her as feminine. The nature of representation is, however, a completely different topic, for another time, perhaps.

The dissonance caused by the sudden presence of a female exemplar in a formerly all-male world doesn't just annoy your actual, card-carrying chauvinists. It also means that those fans who self-identify as liberal feminists while they nestle snuggly into their male-dominated media are suddenly confronted with the fact that, as much as they may not be active sexists, they live in a world filled with passive, institutionalised sexism. People deal badly with discovering that something they love is riddled with ingrained prejudice, and pointing it out to them – whether actively or as a side-effect of casting against that prejudice – tends to get a defensive reaction. In the former case, they will often angrily defend the intentions of the creators, which is all well and good, but good intentions only go so far. The latter is viewed as a betrayal, because the beloved itself is telling them that it was sexist before.

It's a manifestation of the backlash effect, of course. "If we cast a woman as the Doctor now, then all the times we didn't might have been - gasp - sexist. Well, I'm not going to stand by and hear Doctor Who derided as sexist! If the other Doctors were men, that must have been right and proper, because that means Doctor Who was never sexist." (And then there are your card-carrying douchebags, but what can you ever do about them except proper education funding?)

I mean, does this look like someone with two hearts to you?

Female Transformers still mess with people's heads, and the female Doctor raises the same issue in people's minds, with some arguing that making the Doctor female is wrong because the Doctor is an alien and has no gender. The same argument is advanced whenever someone suggests casting a person of colour in the role of the Doctor. It's political correctness gonne madde! The Doctor isn't a white man, he's an alien, so why do you have to drag race/gender into it? If the Doctor is black, they argue, you're corrupting the alien purity of the character with a racial agenda. They argue thusly because black is a race. Likewise, if the Doctor is female, then the Doctor has gender, because female is a gender. White and male on the other hand are not a gender or a race; they're a default. This is, of course, why it is important to cast a woman as the Doctor, or a person of colour(5), because unless it is challenged then white and male will continue to be viewed as the neutral setting, and they just aren't. I for one am glad to see Doctor Who finally stepping up on this.

They're also dark skinned, by the way.
I couldn't find this image attributed; if you can point me to the artist, I will
acknowledge.

It's this perception that makes the Imperial Radch series so interesting. The Radch is an ungendered society, not differentiating at all between male and female. Citizens of the Radch are somewhat androgynous, but also do not code for gender cues, so that they struggle to recognise gender even in outsiders. In the text of the novels, this is represented by using female pronouns for all characters, save for a few instances in the first novel in which Breq, the narrator-protagonist, has to communicate with non-Radch in a gendered language(6). The impact of shifting the default setting is profound, not least in that it barely affects the narrative, but provokes the reader to examine their own expectations. It makes no difference to the story if any given character is male or female, but you catch yourself assuming they are all women until you realise that is... if not impossible, given the setting, then at least unlikely.

A similar effect can be excited in white readers by any novel in which black is considered the default, and only white characters are referred to by race. (White) authors Neil Gaiman and Ben Aaronovich both use this deliberately, in Anansi Boys and the Rivers of London series respectively. It's always a bit of an eye opener when your brain parses the dissonance of someone actually being described as a white man, instead of just a man. To my considerable shame, I don't think I've read enough black literature to know how prevalent this is there; I'm taking steps in that direction as part of this year's reading challenge, because there's no worth in identifying a lack and allowing it to continue.

You know you'e reaching when Michelle Yeoh isn't tough enough for you.

For further proof of the blinkered insistence in white male normalcy, one need look little further than the reaction to the early trailers for Star Trek: Discovery, which angrily denounced the idea of putting a woman in charge of a starship, let alone giving one the lead in a Star Trek series, and never mind a Chinese woman! Do these showrunners not understand Star Trek? Do they think that Gene Roddenberry created the original series in order to show women and non-white characters fully integrated into a multiracial, egalitarian society(7)? Honestly, I suspect that the only reason we don't have record of a similar outrage over the casting of Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko is that DS9 came out shortly before the internet exploded, so he was an established fact by the time a critical mass of aggrieved white men had access to proper forums.

I hope that the new Doctor will challenge the concept of genderless. She shouldn't be the female Doctor, or even 'the Doctor as female' particularly. She should simply be the Doctor, and like any other Doctor 90% of her lines should work for any other Doctor with minimal rewriting(9). If her personality has feminine affects, they should not be in any form so tangible as to be easily describable. She shouldn't be markedly more empathic and nurturing, at least not outside the usual bounds of regenerative variation. She should be compassionate, as the Doctor always should. Even the 12^th Doctor, who has been broadly characterised as an insensitive ass, is compassionate. She definitely shouldn't be getting into a relationship with a companion, male or female, any more than her predecessors did (and less than some of the more recent ones,) and the same definitely goes for crashing the TARDIS(10).

I suppose what I really want the show to prove over the next few seasons is that in the last 12-14(11) regenerations the Doctor was truly not defined by his gender, by not defining the new Doctor by hers.

No regeneration posters with 13 yet, given that she doesn't have a look, so let's finish with some ponies.

(1) And what is the purpose of sexual dimorphism, indeed of sex, in robots? Don't ask, and definitely don't Google.

(2) Optimus Prime's truck windscreen has always turned into his pecks.

(3) The one who died of a tragic love story, incidentally. They're trying, but with mixed results. In fairness, she was also the weaponsmith of the 13.

(4) I love Optimus, but he is so a dude.

(5) Full disclosure, I am still committed to British, but I'm trying to escape that.

(6) Which incidentally means that the only major character whose assigned biological sex is known is Breq's defrosting ice queen sidekick; who is male.

(7) I'll be the first(8) to admit that Roddenberry was often hamfisted and misguided in his attempts to depict his post-scarcity, post-prejudice utopia, but he certain wasn't deliberately creating white man adventures in space. It just... came out that way sometimes.

(8) Okay, I won't, because this subject is waay old and loads of people have already done it.

(9) When Colin Baker took over from Jon Pertwee in The Ultimate Adventure, they basically changed one 'polarity of the neutron flow' and made a fight scene less aikido-y.

(9) Although, fair play, I've played LEGO Dimensions and I've stacked the TARDIS into just about anything and everything in the world.

(10) YMMV.