Julia Sweeney’s ‘SNL’ Character Pat Was Called ‘Anti-Trans Propaganda.’ She Understands the Criticism but Says: ‘Pat Isn’t Trans or Non-Binary’

Julia Sweeney appeared on “The View” ahead of the “SNL” 50th Anniversary special and admitted that she “took it to heart” and “thought about it a lot” when her sketch comedy character Pat was met with controversy from the LGBTQ community. Pat was a recurring character on “SNL” in the early 1990s and headlined the 1994 feature film, “It’s Pat.” The character is an androgynous misfit, with intended humor deriving from those around Pat not being able to figure out Pat’s gender.

“Transparent” creator Joey Soloway made headlines in 2017 for slamming Pat as an “awful piece of anti-trans propaganda.” Soloway said the sketch was a “hateful, hateful, awful thing to do to non-binary people — to create this character that the whole world laughed at openly.”

While Sweeney acknowledged on “The View” that “there was some criticism” of Pat, she reminded viewers that “Pat isn’t trans or non binary. Pat is a man or a woman, but you just don’t know which Pat is. That is the joke, but I did understand the criticism, and I took it to heart and thought about it a lot.”

“But even when we were writing all the sketches ,” she continued, “we were really making fun of the other people not being able to handle the fact that they couldn’t tell. The laughs all came from that. But then, of course, when you’re defending your joke, as we know, you’ve already lost them.”

According to Sweeney, a documentary about Pat has been filmed and “I actually feel very positive about it. It’s gonna come out this next year. And there’s a lot of trans comedy writers in L.A. that were inspired by Pat, that loved Pat. I’ve been interviewed for three years for this documentary, and it was like therapy for me. I was like, yeah, Pat, that was good…I love Pat now.”

Sweeney revived Pat for an episode of Showtime’s “Work in Progress” in 2021.