Rosie O’Donnell showed off a fresh tattoo she got to help remember her nonbinary teenager’s “they/them” pronouns — just to repeatedly refer to the child as “she” while discussing her woke ink.
O’Donnell, 64, told Amy Poehler on her “Good Hang” podcast Tuesday that she got the word “they” tattooed on her left wrist because she had a tough time remembering the pronouns of choice of her 13-year-old child Clay, who came out as nonbinary in 2024.
“It’s very hard, honey. And [gender-neutral pronouns] really matters to them and I know it matters to them. And so when they first told me that it was they/them, I tried my best, but I kept saying ‘she,’” she ‘fessed up about struggling with the pronoun learning curve.
She said Clay, who until recently went by Dakota, wrote “they” on a piece of cardboard and held it aloft as a reminder anytime O’Donnell slipped up and used a “she” pronoun.
O’Donnell, who’s been in “self-imposed political exile” in Ireland since coming undone at the seams following President Trump’s 2024 election victory, brought the pronoun cue card to a tattoo parlor to get the pronoun inked in Clay’s handwriting.
She assumed the teen would be bowled over by her loving gesture, but she was mistaken.
“I had it tattooed on my wrist so that I would never forget, that it would remind me. And I thought she’d be very touched … she didn’t give two s–ts. She could not care less,” O’Donnell recalled, catching herself once again using the wrong pronouns despite the tattoo.
“I just [said she] again in the ‘they’ story! I messed it up!”
The batty comic, who came out as gay on stage at the now-defunct Caroline’s on Broadway comedy club in 2002, told NBC in a 2024 interview that Clay, then 10, had recently explained to her the difference between sex and gender.
“Mommy [genitalia] is their sex. That’s binary. I’m talking about their gender, and gender is infinite.”
O’Donnell adopted Clay during her two-year marriage to late second ex-wife Michelle Rounds — who battled the 12-time Emmy winner for custody of the child before taking her own life in 2017 — and brought the teen to Ireland in January 2025 before Trump was inaugurated for a second term.
She has four other adopted children, Parker, 31, Chelsea, 28, Blake, 26, and Vivienne, 23, from her relationship with her first ex-wife, Kelli Carpenter, whom she divorced in 2007.
