'It's Pat!': Why SNL Character Costarred at Supreme Court Hearing

Every once in a while, you hear something surprising at the Supreme Court.

In today's oral arguments on whether existing civil rights law covers anti-LGBTQ discrimination, it was a mention of Pat, the character of indeterminate gender played by Julia Sweeney on Saturday Night Live in the early 1990s.

The character likely wouldn't fly now, due to the general realization that a person whose gender isn't obvious isn't someone to be laughed at -- although the inability of Pat's associates to wrap their minds around someone who doesn't fit the gender binary probably still merits some lampooning. At any rate, many people remember Pat well, even if Justice Samuel Alito doesn't.

Pamela Karlan, the lawyer representing workers who say they were fired for being gay, brought up Pat in her argument that sexual orientation discrimination is sex discrimination. "If a woman had come in and said, 'I like to date men,' you wouldn't have fired her, and when a man says, 'I like to date men,' you did, that's enough to show sex discrimination," Karlan said, according to a court transcript.

"But what if the decision-maker makes a decision based on sexual orientation but does not know the biological sex of the person involved?" Alito asked.

Karlan responded that there's no reported case of that and asked how, then, a decision-maker would know an employee's sexual orientation. Alito said the decision-maker would know if an employee told them and that this would be just one more of the many hypotheticals the court was dealing with today.

"So this is Saturday Night Live Pat, as -- as an example, right?" Karlan asked the conservative justice, who replied, "I'm not familiar with that." The attorney explained who Pat was and said, "Theoretically that person might be out there. But here is the key: The -- the cases that are brought are almost all brought by somebody who says my employer knew who I was and fired me because I was a man or fired me because I was a woman. Somebody who comes in and says I'm not going to tell you what my sex is, but, believe me, I was fired for my sexual orientation, that person will lose."

Alito said Karlan's argument collapses there, as she was admitting sexual orientation isn't the same thing as sex. Karlan said of course it's not, but sexual orientation discrimination is a subset of sex discrimination. "In the case where the person knows the sex of the person that they are firing or refusing to hire and knows the sex of the people to whom that person is attracted, that is sex discrimination, pure and simple," she said.

Whether Alito and the other justices will be won over to that view remains to be seen. A decision in the case likely won't come until next spring or summer.

And for the record, while Pat didn't fit the gender binary in their appearance, the character apparently didn't identify as nonbinary -- they once said they only date members of the opposite sex, indicating that they do identify as one of the binary genders. They just never told the audience which.