Weekend Update isn’t above getting serious. They just try to balance it with jokes. Cecily Strong famously talked abortions while dressed as a clown. Kate McKinnon faux-praised Ron DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” bill, reasoning that it meant today’s gay students in Florida wouldn’t have to weather so many slurs. And on the most recent SNL, the show’s first nonbinary cast member gave a pep talk to besieged trans kids — while flying, of course.
Molly Kearney dropped in on Weekend Update. We mean that literally: They descended from the sky on wires. They were there to discuss how, among the hundreds of anti-LGBTQIA+ bills introduced across the country, trans kids have been particularly targeted. It must be awful for an already marginalized group. But Kearney was there to both defend them and joke about the painful harness they were wearing.
“I have been hung up on my genitals for far too long, and I’m starting to feel like a freaking Republican lawmaker!” Kearney told the crowd. “At one point I heard a crew guy say, ‘Is she gonna die up there?’ And then another crew guy was like, ’ You mean, are they going to die up there?’”
Kearney was at some points sincere. “If you don’t care about trans kids’ lives, that means you don’t care about freakin’ kids’ lives,” they said. “We are making trans kids grow up too fast. We should be keeping them safe and we need to lift them up.”
By the end of their segment, they ascended into the sky to deliver a message of hope, with jokes.
“What’s happening, kids, is wrong,” they said as they soared over the Weekend Update desk. “And you don’t need to be scared. Our job is to protect you and your job is to focus on being a kid. It’s kind of like me flying in the SNL sky: There’s a bunch of dudes asking you about your crotch and controlling when and where you’re allowed to pee. But if you just hang on, you’ll look up and realize you’re flying, kid!”
You can watch Kearney’s segment in the video above.