Dwyane Wade has recalled how his daughter Zaya Wade being “scared” to tell him about her identity made him examine his role as a father.
The former NBA star, 41, detailed the “landmark moment” his daughter Zaya came out to him as transgender during a conversation with Chris Paul and Lisa Metelus at a Creative Artists Agency event in California.
Wade explained that he was prepared for the coming out discussion years prior, after Zaya previously described herself as gay in a school assignment when she was just eight years old.
“So I came home and I just remember my child being scared to talk to me, like hiding in my wife’s arm in a chair,” he said, referring to his wife and Zaya’s stepmother, Gabrielle Union. “I think I’m this dad that’s like: ‘Hey, come and tell me anything! I’m a cool dad.’”
The retired Miami Heat player shared that he saw “fear in [his] child’s face” as she came out to him, which told him he needed “to check [himself]”.
“I had to go look myself in the mirror and ask myself: ‘Why was my child scared? Scared to tell me something about herself?’” he recalled asking.
Wade then explained how the moment made him self-reflect on how his “masculinity” has negatively impacted his children. “In a lot of work as parents – and as people – what we do is we put our fears and everything on our kids. And I guess I was doing that,” he said. “So I had to go look myself in the mirror and ask myself…What is it about my masculinity that has my child afraid?”
Dwyane Wade and his wife Gabrielle Union have been vocal advocates for the LGBT+ community ever since their daughter Zaya Wade first came out publicly as transgender when she was 12 years old. The couple previously thanked their now 16-year-old daughter “for leading them on their journey” as proud parents of a transgender child and teaching them about the LGBT+ community.
With hundreds of bills currently being introduced in the United States that specifically target trans and nonbinary people, the basketball star admitted that he feels “afraid” for Zaya “every moment” that she leaves the house.
“This is our life. We live this,” the father of four said during last year’s Time100 Summit. “When you’re out there making rules, and if you’re not experiencing this, if you’re not living this, and you’re just out there signing away and making laws, that’s not right. It’s a joke.”
“Come and live a day in my world with my daughter,” he added. “Come and see how it is to walk through this world as her.”
At the 2022 Met Gala, Wade was asked what keeps him fighting to protect his daughter. “Just being a father and just seeing our child grow up every day and doing what you’re supposed to do as a parent,” he told Variety on the Met Gala red carpet. “It’s to make sure you sit back and you see what it is in life that they want to do and you try to go there with them, and try to mould them into what it is they want to be.”
The NBA star also offered advice to fathers who have recently learned they have a transgender child. “The moment when you were in the hospital and you grabbed your daughter, and you looked at your daughter,” he said. “All the things that went through your mind and all the emotions that went through your mind, and how much love fills your heart at that moment.”
“Don’t let that ever leave you, no matter what,” he added, while his wife chimed in: “And we believe them when they tell us who they are.”
In addition to Zaya, Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union are parents to daughter Kaavia James, four. Union is also a stepmother to Wade’s children: Zaire, 21, and Xavier, nine.
