Dwyane Wade Opens Up to Trevor Noah About Parenting a Trans Daughter: ‘I See a Beautiful Blossoming 14-Year-Old Girl’
Dwyane Wade will undoubtedly enter the Basketball Hall-of-Fame, but the retired NBA star is currently more focused on building his candidacy as a Hall-of-Fame parent.
Wednesday night, Wade joined Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, to promote his new photographic memoir Dwyane. While discussing his basketball career, Noah also asked Wade about his reaction to becoming the parent of a transgender daughter.
“When things happen personally to you, when you have a personal connection to something or someone, you take it a little bit more serious,” Wade said. “When it happens to you, you have to look at it in the face.”
Zaya Wade came out as trans in 2020, at the age of 12. The retired NBA superstar and his wife Gabrielle Union have displayed unwavering support for Zaya while becoming strong allies for the LGBTQ+ community.
“As a parent, you want to make sure when your kids come to you, you have answers, you have the right words, you have the right support, whatever it is, you have the right motivation. At that moment, I had no answers,” Wade said of the moment Zaya came out. “The only answer that I knew and that I had is that this is my child. I love them and I hate the pain my child is in.”
“I just see a beautiful, blossoming, 14-year-old girl who’s trying to pass her test at school just like everybody else,” Wade continued. “My wife and I, our whole role and our whole job, and we understand this, is to provide, to protect, to love, to facilitate.
“We have all these rules. It’s not to own. It’s not to say, ‘You’re going to be this, you’re going to do that.’ It’s to find out who they are. To find out their likes, and what are their dislikes are. And try to help them through life, to find themselves. It’s not about us.”
Wade retired from the NBA in 2019, after a 16-year career in the league that included 13 All-Star appearances. Although he’s much more focused on being a parent to his four children, the 39-year-old still displayed elite athleticism on The Daily Show when he used cat-like reflexes to catch Noah’s coffee mug at the end of the segment.
Watch above via Comedy Central
