This week, my Simpsons class and I are doing our unit on sex and sexuality, using my chapter in my and Du’s new book, The Simpsons’ Beloved Springfield.
One of the episodes I like to use is 2005’s “There’s Something About Marrying.”
The same-sex marriage debate comes to Springfield, dividing, briefly the Simpsons’ household, as Marge lobbies Reverend Lovejoy to be more accepting, and Homer protests legalization. (When Homer realizes he can profit from officiating gay weddings, he changes his position.)
Patty soon announces she’s marrying a professional female golfer. Marge has been in denial about her sister’s sexuality, which is moderately understandable, since Patty almost married Seymour Skinner once. Marge’s liberal positions don’t hold true when she’s asked to accept her sister.
Marge comes around, of course–she does love her sister.
But Patty doesn’t get married. Marge has discovered that the other bride-to-be is actually a groom. He is posing as a female not because it aligns with his gender, but to be a female golfer. He and Patty hadn’t yet had sex, and he wasn’t going to tell Patty until after the wedding.
When he asks Patty to accept him as a man, she declines: “Hell, no! I like girls!”
The last time I taught this episode, two years ago, some of the students’ responses surprised me.
Many of them conflated the golfer’s fraud with being transgender, even though the show clearly indicates that’s not the case. And some argued that Patty should have married him, that if she loved the person, she shouldn’t care what kind of body he was in.
While I could understand this came from a good place, a place of more fluid gender boundaries, I had to push back.
He lied to her, after all. And he planned to lie to her until after they were legally bound together. “What was going to happen,” I asked, “on their wedding night when she learned she’d been deceived in such a way?”
Lying aside, I also tried to explain that Patty might just not be sexually attracted to men. And that we shouldn’t judge her for not also liking men.
In twenty years of teaching this show, I’ve gone from pushing against students’ homophobia against John in “Homer’s Phobia” to insisting that Patty’s lesbianism doesn’t have to turn into full-on pansexuality.
Who would have thought, all those years ago, that a lesbian character would come off as too sexually conservative? And what will push my students’ children’s buttons in the years to come?
While it doesn’t seem the character was meant to be read as transgender, his story does mirror the common stereotype that trans people are just trying to “trick” others into romantic or sexual relationships. For someone savvy to trans issues (and perhaps not super familiar with the show) I don’t think it would be unreasonable to conclude that that’s what the writers were going for, contrary to their intentions.