Rosie O’Donnell opened up this week about her struggle to remember her nonbinary child’s pronouns and the heartwarming lengths she’s gone to to remind herself.
The actress, comedian, and television host was a guest on Tuesday’s episode of Amy Poehler’s Good Hang podcast, where she tended to misgender her youngest child, 13-year-old Clay, when speaking about them.
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At one point, Poehler asked O’Donnell about the title of her one-woman show, Common Knowledge, which she performed at the Daryl Roth Theatre in New York City from July 22 to August 8. The show, O’Donnell said, is “a love letter” to Ireland, where she moved in January 2025 ahead of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, as well as to Clay, who is on the autism spectrum.
In explaining the origin of the show’s title, which comes from a conversation she had with Clay, O’Donnell began by referring to her 13-year-old as “she,” but immediately corrected herself, explaining that Clay’s pronouns are they/them.
“I love that you’re constantly correcting in real-time, like we all do,” Poehler interjected. “It’s really beautiful.”
“And it really matters to them,” O’Donnell said, “And I know it matters to them.”
O’Donnell went on to recount how after Clay came out as nonbinary, “I tried my best, but I kept saying ‘she.’”
“So they wrote on a cardboard paper, ‘they,’ and then they would hold it up above their head every time I said ‘she,’ like John Cusack in Say Anything, with the boombox, just staring at me,” O’Donnell recalled.
O’Donnell said she then took Clay to her cousin’s tattoo shop where she got the word “they” tattooed on her wrist in Clay’s handwriting.
“I had it tattooed on my wrist, so that I would never forget, that it would remind me,” she said. “And I thought she’d be very touched and she didn’t give two sh**s. She could not care less!”
O’Donnell quickly realized she’s just misgendered Clay throughout the story.
“And I just said ‘she!’ I just did it again in the ‘they’ story,” she exclaimed. “I messed it up!”
O’Donnell previously discussed her “they” tattoo and the conversations she’d had with Clay about gender in a 2024 interview with NBC Chicago.
“Every time I say ‘she,’ [Clay] goes, ‘Your tattoo isn’t working,’” O’Donnell joked.
“They said to me, ‘Mommy, there are some kids in my class who don’t even know their gender,’” O’Donnell recalled. “So like an idiot I say, ‘Tell them next time they’re in the bathtub to look down.”
“They say, ‘Mommy, that’s their sex. That’s binary. I’m talking about their gender, and gender is infinite,’” O’Donnell continued. She and host Matt Rodrigues likened trans and nonbinary people’s understanding of their gender identity to cisgender gay and lesbian people’s understanding of their sexuality.
“It’s the same thing,” O’Donnell said. “I don’t know where the journey is going to take them. I am supportive of any way that they want to be in this world.”
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