What's the Deal with Rose Noble?

Depending on how much you dig into the media surrounding shows, you may or may not have been aware that there was a trans character on Doctor WhoThe longest running sci-fi franchise (at least in terms of sheer seasons), Doctor Who has seen cancelations, relaunches, and reboots, but the core of the series remains the same: a madman in a box traveling through time and space.. I phrase it that way because the show itself handled it pretty well. The character in question is Rose Noble, played by Yasmin Finney, and her character is the daughter of series mainstay companion Donna Noble. She was introduced in the first of the three 14th Doctor specials, "The Star Beast", returned for a couple of scenes in "The Giggle", and might just show up again in the future.

The thing is that, if you didn't know the actor was trans there's a good chance you might have missed the fact that her character was, in fact, trans on the show. I missed it entirely just because the show handles it with subtlety and grace. It doesn't handle every part of its story with that level of grace (the proper pronouns for the Meep, for example, feel heavy-handed in the moment), but Rose's introduction is done well. Going back and watching the episode again, I actually see where they put nods to her character and her gender status, but again, it's well handled. Nothing about it feels like the show is trying to make a big, political statement. It normalizes her character.

Not everyone felt the same way, though. The show garnered millions of viewers during the airing of "The Star Beast", and a little over 100 people called into complain to the BBC about how there was a trans character on TV. "This is a show that children watch!" and all the dumb crap you always see and hear from these kinds of people. If we compare -- viewership of 5.08 M, 100 (that's one hundred) complaints -- we get a ratio of 1:0.000196, or one complaint out of every 50,000 viewers, give or take. That is a tiny, tiny fraction of the viewing audience. So can you guess which group the news media has been focused on? Yep, the complaints.

"Doctor Who moving ahead with controversial character," reads one headline, and there are a bunch like this. Remember, it's a tiny amount of people, overall, that complained. One complaint out of every 50,000 people is statistical noise. In the world of broadcast media, people will complain for anything, for any reason, because (to be blunt) Karens exist everywhere. Someone will complain because they don't like the color of an on-screen couch, or because the find some wall art in the background of a scene offensive. One hundred people total complaining about a trans actor on screen isn't even a blip in the scope of viewership. Those 100 people could tune out, never come back, and no one at the BBC would notice or care.

You know how we can tell this isn't a big deal for the BBC? They already had the character show up again on the show, and they've said she's likely to return. If they were worried about this hundred people and their viewership they should have made a bigger statement, or said, "we didn't realize this character would be a problem..." or something. They didn't. Naturally the executives in charge of Doctor Who weren't going to say anything since they're all pro-LGBTQ+, but someone at the BBC would have made some kind of hand-wringing statement. They didn't.

But other outlets are making a big deal out of it. "Oh no, one hundred people complained about this character. Obviously there will be some people that find the mere existence of trans people controversial. That's bigotry and hate and it is, sadly, part of human civilization. The point isn't to encourage it, though, but headlines like this, where the trans character is called "controversial" even when most people didn't really care one way or the other about her inclusion, makes it seem like her very existence is a civilization-ending threat. That's the opposite or normalizing her existence.

When I say that most people didn't care about her being there, being trans, in my head I always think that's the goal. I don't care if someone next to me is a man or a woman or some other pronoun, what color they are, what their sexual orientation is. They're human and that's it as far as I'm concerned. Normalizing their existence means you think of them as a human, where the pronoun they use has as much weight on your day as their favorite food or what they thought of the most recent John WickStarted as a tale of redemption and then revenge (in that order), the John Wick series has grown to be a adynamic, reliable action series that doesn't skimp on the hard hits and gun-toting thrills, elevating Keanu Reeves as one of the greatest action stars ever. movie. They are there, they exist, and you move on with your life because, well, that's just what you do.

But there's this thread in the media, especially on social media, that demonizes trans people and trans characters. They're different, they're "other", and there is a large subset of humanity that hates "the other". Racism, sexism, anti-gay and anti-trans, there are people that will hate for the sake of hate because someone doesn't fit their tiny, narrow view of the world. And trans hate is very real and very ingrained in British culture. That's changing, slowly, and change is good, but the only way you make that change is by presenting people as people and normalizing their existence.

All the outlets that reviewed "The Star Beast" and simply talked about the adventure of the 14th Doctor and his companions got the point. These are people, frankly, on a silly little sci-fi adventure. It's a show about aliens in big, dumb costumes (especially in "The Star Beast"), running around, saying techno-babble and trying, for all their hearts (two of them in the case of the Doctor) to sell the silly media on screen. And we love it. Doctor Who is great. But with all these weird, fantastical things out there for the show to focus on, some people in the media want to focus on Yasmin Finney's Rose as if she's somehow the cause of the moral degradation of British civilization. She's not, and all the complainers (all 100 of them) are awful people.

This issue is, of course, hate and it would be lovely if we could just fix the problem of hatred for each other. But until then, what we need are media outlets to actually report the truth. "Doctor Who moving forward with controversial character," isn't the truth. "Hateful bigots attack trans character on Doctor Who," is far more accurate. But one headline gets people worked up and one doesn't. Each might alienate a different segment of the reading public, but then, who do you want to side with? The bigots? I would hope not.

Rose Noble is an enjoyable character, well acted by Yasmin Finney. I do hope she returns just because she's fun to watch. She also adds more representation to television, on one of the BBC's biggest shows. That's valuable as well. The bigots can stay mad; we don't need them. The rest of us will enjoy our Doctor Who.