Dr. Who??????

Well, I was never really able to get into Dr. Who, though I could see that it was pretty cool. Since I'm not a fan, commenting is really kibitzing...but...given the nature of the story, casting a woman as the Doctor seems like a natural to me, and always has. I kinda wish it had happened much earlier, and not now, as this will, undoubtedly, be seen as a victory for the forces of PC/SJ darkness...and that's bad, obviously. They don't need any more cultural momentum than they already have. But waddaya gonna do? Somebody dopey will probably always consider any good decision a victory...so you largely have to divide through by what the crazies think. I'm sure there are also some fans who always want the Doctor to be a dude...but...unless there's some element of the story I don't know about, that seems like a hard position to defend. I agree that this is about the worst time to do this...but I think the coolness and consistency considerations outweigh the other ones. I fear we'll see a bunch of this sort of thing to pander to the PCs...but waddayagonnado?
   A little additional minor bitching about terminology in the story. I've harped on this sort of thing ten thousand times, but: it's kinda bad to say that this is about the doctor's "gender." It's true that normal people tend to use 'gender' as a polite term for 'sex,' so they use them as synonyms in that context...but the old-school feminists were right: there's an important sex/gender distinction. The sexes are biological categories (male and female), the genders are behavioral ones (masculine and feminine). Trying to stick to this distinction allows you speak much more precisely, and say important things like men need not be masculine and women need not be feminine. Also, the PC left now intentionally blurs the distinction in order to advance the currently-fashionable PC theory of transgenderism. If you push people to mind the distinction, a lot of the fallacious reasoning undergirding that theory is more transparently sophistical. So I think there are good reasons to mind it.

[Just wanted to add once again that I find this kind of thing generally cool, and tend to like female protagonists.. So, though I'll wince if this becomes a PC-motivated trend, I like the idea in and of itself, even when there's no obvious narrative opening for it as in Dr. Who. Sarah Michelle Gellar used to say that she wanted to play James Bond, and I actually thought that was a kind of cool alternate-universe-y idea. Bond has to be British, obviously...but you could make up some little story about 'James Bond' being a code name... I dunno. I would understand pushback against that...but I still think it's a cool idea.]