The actor playing Doctor Who, the British sci-fi character who has been played by various men for 54 years, has just been replaced by a woman, whom I am calling Nurse Who, which, I assure you, is meant with all due respect.  For those of you who are fans of science fiction, this trend of performing gender reassignment surgery on male characters is not unfamiliar.

1) Star Wars replaced Luke Skywalker with the ultimate "Mary Sue" named Rey – a character who, without any training, beats Luke Skywalker in a duel, knows how to fly spaceships, and beats the villain in her very first lightsaber fight, while he had trained for years.

2) Star Trek replaced Captain Kirk with Michael Burnham, a black woman who, with the help of supporting gay and Muslim crewmembers, is always successful in beating the Klingons.  (In the future, Muslim crewmembers do not throw gay crew members off the tops of starships.)

3) Battlestar Galactica replaced the male character Starbuck with a female character also named Starbuck and replaced Commander Cain with a lesbian who had a physical relationship with a luscious female Cylon robot.  (No, this is not a joke.)

So it is not surprising that yet another established male character bites the dust.  But it is even worse in the case of Doctor Who, because in Doctor Who it is established that the character "regenerates" every few years, and each actor who plays the part is considered related to the other actors who played the part before him.  Therefore, Doctor Who changing into a woman pushes the propaganda of the "transgendered" crowd when they claim that men can change into women and vice versa.

Nurse Who is played by Jodi Whittaker, and while I don't know her skill as an actress, I do wonder whether the BBC might have thought twice about selecting an actress for a children's show whose past nude roles have resulted in nude photos being very, very easily available on the internet.  But I'm sure that doesn't bother progressives.

Every Doctor (or Nurse, in this case) has a companion, and Nurse Who's companion is very, very progressive, even by BBC standards: a black lesbian named Bill Potts.  Now that Nurse Who is a woman, perhaps Nurse Who can have a romantic relationship with her companion.  That would be another first for Doctor Who.

So, once again, we have the misappropriation of a very, very established male character.  Have you ever wondered why the BBC didn't simply make a spinoff of Dr. Who starring a character who, you know, was already a woman?  It turns out that the BBC did that with a series called The Sarah Jane Smith Adventures, focusing on a former Dr. Who companion of the same name.  But the BBC has not been keen to do that again.  Perhaps the network's executives believe that a lesbian of color like "Bill Potts" cannot carry a show on her own.  Hence the reappropriation, once again, of an established male character to fulfill a political agenda.

Questions for discussion:

1) In some episodes, the Doctor time-travels into the past and meets his earlier selves.  Do you think it is possible for Nurse Who to travel back in time and get impregnated by one of her earlier selves, becoming both the mother and the father of her own child?

2) When Nurse Who first encounters the Cybermen and Daleks, do you think they will laugh and refuse to take her seriously?

Ed Straker is the senior writer at Newsmachete.com.