Dwyane Wade Shares What He Learned From the Cast of 'Pose'

After former NBA star and parent of the year Dwyane Wade revealed that his daughter Zaya has officially come out as trans, he’s continued speaking up about parenting a child who is part of the LGBTQ+ community. And now he’s sharing how others helped in that journey.

Wade appeared on Watch What Happens Live With Andy Cohen last week and one of the callers asked him what the biggest lesson he and his wife, Gabrielle Union, learned from the cast of Pose about supporting Zaya through her transition.

His answer was simple, but something that a lot of cis people still seem to struggle with.

“First of all, we got information. We didn’t have a lot of information,” Wade admitted. “And we reached out about pronouns. Something as simple as pronouns, we wanted to make sure that we didn’t get it wrong. So we reached out about the pronouns and making sure that we said the right things to our daughter.”

When Wade first spoke publicly about Zaya coming to him and Union to talk to them about using she/her pronouns and the name Zaya, he mentioned that consulting the cast of Pose was the first thing his wife did to help them help their daughter.

And while he has also previously stressed that educating himself in matters of the LGBTQ+ community is part of his responsibility as a father, it’s also been so clear that merely being open to everything Zaya says has gotten them halfway there.

“She’s identifying as a young lady, and we wanted to make sure that we got all the pronouns right, that we got all the language right,” Wade told Andy, “so we reached out to make sure that we had all the information that we needed, because we are learning in this process as well.”