Dwyane Wade recalls challenging locker-room culture before daughter Zaya came out as trans: “I wasn’t in on the jokes no more”
Zaya Wade has the biggest cheerleader in her dad, former NBA player Dwyane Wade. (Getty Images)
Dwyane Wade is opening up about a shift in attitude he experienced before his daughter Zaya came out as transgender, as well as a difficult conversation he had with longtime teammate and friend Udonis Haslem while his family was navigating his daughter’s identity.
In a 16 September appearance on Conversations With Cam podcast, the retired NBA star recalled how his own behaviour began changing before Zaya publicly came out as transgender in 2020.
“Before we came out and talked about Zaya in the locker rooms, I started to, like, become a little different. I started listening a little bit differently,” Wade said.
Navigating a “toxic” environment
Wade described the NBA locker-room environment he grew up in as a “masculine, toxic environment” and said he stopped participating in jokes and conversations that he had previously tolerated.
“I wasn’t in on the jokes no more. I wasn’t laughing. I was leaving out of the locker room when I would hear certain things,” he recalled.
One person whose language began bothering him was Haslem, his longtime Miami Heat teammate and close friend. Wade said Haslem was still “in on the jokes” at the time, but didn’t know what Wade and his family were privately experiencing.
“He didn’t know, and he eventually changed his thinking, his verbiage, and then his actions,” Wade said.
Wade emphasised that the change came through a conversation in which Haslem felt safe enough to ask questions and engage with something he had not grown up knowing about or feeling comfortable discussing.
“The power of someone that he trusts to have a safe conversation with him in a safe environment” can allow someone to “support something [and] believe in something that he didn’t grow up knowing anything about or being comfortable talking about,” Wade explained.
For Wade, that experience perfectly demonstrated why more spaces are needed where people can listen, learn and reconsider assumptions rather than immediately rejecting something unfamiliar.
Wade and Zaya in the public eye
Wade is a three-time NBA champion with the Miami Heat and a Finals MVP (2006), and he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as part of the Class of 2023. He is married to actor Gabrielle Union.
He has been publicly supportive of Zaya after she came out as transgender and has spoken about parenting and protecting trans youth amid political backlash. In 2023, Wade said he had once imagined a future where he and Zaya would be “hooping” together before she came out at age 12, reflecting on that shift in an interview about “meeting his child”. In 2024, Wade and Zaya launched a digital “safe space” for trans youth.
Zaya, now 19 years old, has made a name as a fashion influencer, model and prominent advocate for transgender young people. Wade and his wife, Gabrielle Union, have consistently spoken publicly about supporting her, with Wade previously describing Zaya as “the strong one in this family” and “a hero.”
