Zaya was born in 2007, the same year as LeBron James’s son Bryce and Carmelo Anthony’s son Kiyan. Back then, Wade thought they’d all grow up around basketball, maybe even following in their dads’ footsteps. “All our kids gonna grow up hooping together,” Wade said, recalling the plan years later on the Club Shay Shay podcast. “See what happens when you start making plans for other people’s lives?” he added, laughing at himself. Because Zaya wasn’t the son he’d pictured, and at 12, she made that plain to her father and stepmother, Gabrielle Union, asking to be called Zaya and referred to as she/her.

What Wade has only recently gotten into detail about is what unlearning those assumptions actually looked and felt like. On a September 16 appearance on the Conversations With Cam podcast, hosted by Cameron Oaks Rogers, Wade shared that before he and his family addressed Zaya’s identity in 2020, something in him had already begun to shift, beginning in the Miami Heat locker room.

“Well, long story short, when everything happened publicly… with Zaya, before we came out and talked about Zaya, obviously, you know, in the locker rooms, I started to like become a little different because I started listening a little bit differently. And I, you know, I realized that masculine, you know, toxic environment that, you know, that we that we grew up in.”

This led him to one teammate whose language stopped sitting right with him, a friend he’d known since his rookie year. That teammate was Udonis Haslem, who spent all 20 of his NBA seasons in Miami and stood next to Wade through every one of the Heat’s three championships, in 2006, 2012 and 2013.

“And I remember having a conversation with UD because he seen that I was like I wasn’t in on the jokes no more,” Wade said. “I wasn’t laughing. I was leaving out of the locker room when I would hear certain things or whatever. And I had to sit and talk to him about it because, you know, just like I was at one point, he was in on the jokes at the same time. And this was my brother. And I started feeling a way about his uses of words and his uses of, you know, different communities.”

Wade then brought in how the shared trust let them do the learning-unlearning together.

“And from that conversation that him and I had, like he didn’t know, right? He didn’t know,” Wade said. “And he eventually changed his thinking, his tone, his verbiage, and then his actions, right? And so like just the power of someone that he trusts to have a safe conversation with him in a safe environment allowed for him to feel safe to support something, believe in something that he didn’t grow up knowing anything about or, you know, or being comfortable talking about.”

Wade first spoke about his daughter’s identity publicly on The Ellen DeGeneres Show in February 2020, telling Ellen DeGeneres that his 12-year-old had come home and asked to be called Zaya. He’s since said he believes she’d known who she was since she was about three. And it was in February 2023 that a Los Angeles County judge approved a name and gender-marker change Wade had petitioned for the previous August, over an objection from Zaya’s mother, Siohvaughn Funches.

Letting go of the son he’d imagined, he’s said, meant he finally “got to meet” the child he actually had.

Now, over the years, his daughter has helped him become more understanding, and Wade has tried to support her in all ways possible, even if that meant moving away. Wade and Union relocated from Florida to California in 2021, citing the state’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation and saying his family “would not be accepted or feel comfortable there.” Three years later, he and Zaya launched Translatable, a resource platform for LGBTQIA+ youth and their families, with funds from Wade’s 2024 Elevate Prize Catalyst Award.

Zaya, for her part, has kept growing into her own story rather than her father’s. She told Seventeen last year: “I’ve never been happier than how I am on estrogen. I just feel so perfect.” Now 19, she’s studying science in college, having developed a particular interest in astrobiology, and has told People that life away from home has been “really hard” but also “exciting” and “freeing.”

Wade, 44, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2023, but over the years, his legacy has become about more than just those three championship rings. A lot of it now comes down to fatherhood, being emotionally open, and actually being willing to have the difficult conversations.

As he explained on Rogers’ podcast, that’s really what he wants more of: conversations like the one he had with Haslem, where people get the chance to ask questions, understand each other, and maybe come around instead of being written off right away. And in that sense, his conversation with Haslem wasn’t just some side note in Zaya’s story. In a way, Wade was already learning the kind of listening his daughter would eventually need from him.