Doctor Who: 10 Crazy Internet Reactions To The 13th Doctor

Back in 2013 YouGov asked members of the British public if they thought it was important for the Doctor to be played by a male actor. It was a close run thing, but rather misleadingly they announced the result with the headline 'Doctor Who Must Be A Man'.

The BBC played in safe in the end and replaced Matt Smith with Peter Capaldi. But there was never any doubt that the first woman Doctor would come sooner than later.

During Capaldi’s four years on the show the ground was being prepared and the corporation now firmly believes that the public is ready for the change in gender. But are they right? Already they've officially responded to a rush of complaints with a pre-prepared statement and some disgruntled fans have started an ill fated petition to reverse the decision.

Another poll conducted this week suggests that the general public are mostly indifferent to the casting decision, and yet the media is always going to point out the extreme views on both sides of the debate - views that are not hard to find in the age of social media. The internet is a hotbed of reactions from the ecstatic to the apoplectic, and some pretty crazy arguments are doing the rounds.

Despite the fact that more than half of all GPs in the United Kingdom are women, this ‘joke’ comment keeps popping up online. Even the nurse bit is a gross distortion of the facts. Hospital nursing might be underrepresented by men (around one in ten), but in the community there are nearly as many male carers as there are female.

Applying such outdated stereotypes to Doctor Who is highly blinkered: have they forgotten that the Doctor has had both a female student Doctor (Martha Jones) and a male nurse (Rory) as companions? The term Doctor applies to the Time Lord only in its broadest sense – as someone who defines herself as a caregiver. Behind the ‘joke’ is all kinds of wrong, not only false assumptions about careers and gender, but also an implicit ranking of each profession’s relative value and importance.

Doctor Suzanne Koven, writing for the Boston Globe notes that “In an outpatient practice such as mine, the distinction between doctors’ and nurses’ roles can be subtle. Nurse practitioners, who have both bachelors and masters degrees plus special certification, prescribe medication, perform physical exams, and act in many ways indistinguishable from doctors.”