Sharing their truth! Busy Philipps revealed that her 12-year-old child, Birdie, is gay and uses they/them pronouns.
“For those of you who are my friends listening at home, this is the first you’re hearing that Birdie is gay and out,” the Dawson’s Creek alum, 41, said on the Wednesday, December 30, episode of her “Busy Philipps Is Doing Her Best” podcast. “Birdie told us at 10 years old and we immediately … I mean, obviously, I knew that Birdie knew.”
Philipps acknowledged that she has “been doing a bad job” remembering to use the correct pronouns for her eldest child, but Birdie does not take offense.
“Birdie said that they would like their pronouns to be they them, and I haven’t been doing it,” the actress told her cohosts Shantira Jackson and Caissie St. Onge. “I have this public persona and I want Birdie to be in control of their own narrative and not have to answer to anybody outside of our friends and family if they don’t want to. Bird was like, ‘I don’t give a f–k. You can talk about how I’m gay and out. You can talk about my pronouns. That would be cool with me. That’s great.’ So I said, ‘OK, I can talk about it on the podcast.’”
Philipps shares Birdie and 7-year-old daughter Cricket with her husband, Marc Silverstein, whom she married in June 2007.
Elsewhere in Wednesday’s podcast episode, the former Busy Tonight host told listeners that she recently walked in on Birdie “lying on the floor in the dark” listening to Harry Styles’ 2019 album, Fine Line. Soon after, they had an “emotional” conversation about Birdie and the future.
“I was like, ‘Are you all right? Do you want to talk about anything?’ And Birdie said, ‘It’s just, I feel like I’m alive but I’m not really living, you know? And I just want the living part to start,’” Philipps said. “I said, ‘Well, first off, welcome to being my daughter.’”
All kidding aside, the Freaks and Geeks alum went on to give Birdie a few pieces of advice: “This is living, you can’t wait for it to start. … You get to build your life however the f–k you want to, and it doesn’t have to look like anything you’ve ever seen or anything that’s ever been modeled for you because maybe it doesn’t exist. You get to choose what will make you feel fulfilled and happy. It doesn’t have to be any of these constructs that we’ve all been fed our whole lives. This is a different world that you get to f–king build.”
