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For months now, celebrities have been coming out of the woodworks to lend their unsolicited opinions to Zaya Wade’s identity and the way her parents, Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union are choosing to raise her—which is essentially accepting how she is choosing to identify.
Many of us may have been wondering if Dwyane and Gabby were privy to the comments people like Lil Boosie, J Boog and Lil Mama made about Zaya. And during a recent episode of the I Am Athlete podcast, Wade proved that not only was he aware, he shared a message for those who would like to disparage his daughter.
Interestingly enough, his comments were extremely positive.
See what he had to say below.
“Even as a 39-year-old man, it’s hard for me to come out and say certain things about how I feel because of what the world might say. So I look at my child and I say thank you for leading the way. Now, let me take it from here. I am your father, I am in the public eye. You sit back, we will take it from here. You led the way, you gave us the confidence to say our child is this. And understand this, it’s ever-evolving. Who our child is today, may not be who our child is in ten years. We’re going down this journey with our child.
Zaya started this. We all are led by Zaya, who’s 13-years-old. All of our job was to see nothing but love. We don’t see color. (laughs) We don’t see gender. We don’t see sexuality. We see love. And so Zaire, I give him a lot of credit. As a young, teenage boy, to be able to go to school and his friends, writing on his social media about his sister, about his sibling and to be able to handle it the way he’s handling it. He was able to go out into the world and get these questions, these jokes and all that. And to see him say, ‘I don’t care about none of that. All I care about is my sister, my sibling being happy.’ Even if he don’t understand it.
At the end of the day, what I’m dealing with people is I’m dealing with life and death. It’s people in the transgender community that are getting killed. It’s kids who are murdering themselves, they’re hanging themselves. They’re killing themselves because something as simple as acceptance, something as simple as unconditional love is not being given to these kids and I’ll be g*td*mned if my child is going to be that person for something as simple as me supporting who you are.
So Boosie, all the people who got something to say, J. Boogie, who just came out recently, all the people who got something to say about my kids, I thank you because you’re allowing the conversation to keep going forward. Because you know what, you might not have the answer today, I don’t have all the answers but we’re growing from all these conversations.
So I thank everybody for even hating and starting those conversations because those conversations are starting other conversations that we need to have. And that’s happening out there.”
You can watch the clip from this episode in the video below.
