It’s time to revisit Pat.
Recently, Julia Sweeney appeared on The View to discuss the 50th SNL anniversary, and one of the topics was about her character Pat. The intended joke for that character was that nobody knew Pat’s gender and they were trying to figure it out through gender stereotypes.
Sweeney’s position appeared to be that, while she can understand the criticism, it’s not a transphobic character because Pat themself is cisgender: The joke is in the lengths people go to because it’s so important to them. She also defended herself on the grounds that many trans writers in Hollywood have told her how inspiring or amusing the character was for them.
To respond to the second claim: Posh. I’ve had a lot of Black students tell me I personally can use the n-word. That doesn’t mean that I can, or that it would be harmless for me to do so, it just means that those particular Black students are okay with it. And someone of Sweeney’s stature is going to be surrounded by people wanting to stay on her good side, so I think it’s natural she’d get more trans people in the industry saying good things than bad.
And Sweeney herself continues to show ignorance of the greater issue during this interview when she says that Pat isn’t trans, she’s a man or a woman. Excuse me? I know what she meant (Pat is cisgender) but that’s not what she said.
That aside, I can see the intent, and in light of the last few years, especially the last month, I understand the joke itself: It is, again, about how obsessed people are about other people’s gender.
The problem is context. Sweeney is so cisgender she doesn’t even understand why it’s problematic to say that Pat isn’t trans, they’re a man or a woman. And she points out that when you’re defending a joke, you’ve already lost. Finally, one of the last statements (by one of the panelists, possibly Sara Haines?) was, “It wasn’t about Pat, it was about all of us laughing at Pat.” To which Sweeney says, “Right.”
And there it is. Even after Sweeney has defended herself, even after she’s discussed her own redemption arc, there it still is. The brunt of the joke is Pat’s androgyny. Surely the defense of this closing thought would be that it was a slip of the tongue, but I’m not so sure that’s true.
Something can be well-intentioned and yet still harmful. Something can be positive for some people and hurtful to others. I feel like Sweeney has allowed herself to be exonerated of the harm because the trans people in her bubble are shielding herself from it, but that doesn’t mean that Pat as a character is harmless.
To be fair, the character was from a different era, and compared to other gender-flexible depictions of that era, it was on the mild side. Once the initial premise was established, most of the jokes were about gender stereotypes, and overall reinforced that gender stereotypes were limiting for complex humans. There were certainly positive sides to the sketches (although, if movie audiences are to be believed, not enough for a full-length movie, which currently has an iMDB rating of 2.8 out of 10).
But there’s still that cloud of what was the true core of the humor: The fact that everyone wanted so badly to gender Pat, or the fact that Pat refused to be gendered but wasn’t left alone?
I honestly sat down to this piece having been swayed over to Sweeney’s side, but the more I wrote and the more I thought about it, the more I returned to: No, it was a careless character created from a place of cisgender privilege. At best, it’s indifferent to Pat’s cultural alienation in order to center the obsession of their alienators. That’s not a very good “at best”.
And all of this is why trans creators are best equipped to handle trans issues.