Doctor Who’s Yasmin Finney: ‘As a trans teenage girl, I never saw myself represented anywhere on TV’
When Yasmin Finney was cast in Doctor Who, the producers gave her a list of words she might find being used against her online. “I looked at them and thought, ‘Oh my God, there’s so many words that I was basically called in high school’. Words that make you think, ‘This is ridiculous, who would call someone this?’” She painstakingly entered them – more than 100 hateful slurs – into the muted words features on her Twitter/X and Instagram accounts. “I’m very used to online bigotry and vile comments,” she says. “But [the producers] were saying, ‘You would be surprised what can be said about you, especially in this universe’.”
In the three 60th anniversary Doctor Who specials, the last of which is broadcast tonight on BBC1, Finney plays Rose, the daughter of one time Doctor Who companion Donna (played by Catherine Tate). Rose is a teenage trans girl, just as Finney was when they filmed the episode last year – she has since turned 20.
In the Russel T Davies-written episode “The Star Beast”, which was screened in November, Rose stumbles across a cute, fluffy alien
