Dwyane Wade left Florida over fears his family 'wouldn't be accepted there'
Dwayne Wade has admitted that he left Florida over fears that his family 'wouldn't be accepted there'.
The former NBA player spent much of his 16-year professional baseball career at Miami Heat, before retiring from the sport in 2019.
Due to the team he was playing for, his family was based in The Sunshine State, with his children growing up there.
But the Wade family uprooted California shortly after his retirement, with the retired star admitting that he decided to move his family because of Florida's restrictive laws targeting the LGBTQ+ community.
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Wade's 15-year-old daughter Zaya came out as transgender in 2020, with the pair being big advocates for LGBTQ+ rights ever since.
Since publicly coming out at the age of 12, Zaya has been inspiring other teens to live their truth, and has even become a fashion influencer in recent times.
And she certainly has the supporter of her father and step-mom Gabrielle Union.
"She's the strong one in this family. She's a hero," Dwayne said this year.
"It's our family's job to make sure that we listen to her. We listen to the doctors.
"We ask questions and we formulate our own ideas of how Zaya should be and should be raised in this world and we don't allow others to do that for us."
Clearly, Wade feels that Florida is not a good place for LGBTQ+ people, as per comments he made for Showtime’s Headliners.
Speaking to host Rachel Nichols, Wade said: "That’s another reason why I don’t live in that state. A lot of people don’t know that.
"I have to make decisions for my family, not just personal, individual decisions. Obviously, the taxes is great. Having Wade County is great. But my family would not be accepted or feel comfortable there.
"And so that’s one of the reasons why I don’t live there."
Florida has been the epicentre of controversy with laws about LGBTQ+ people, with governor Ron DeSantis signing the 'Don't Say Gay' into law last year, which prohibits the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity from pre-school to third grade.
As for Wade, he credits his father for his own attitudes towards parenting, saying he was just 'a mirror image of the way he loved us and the way that he accepted not only myself and my brother, but other kids in the community'.
"I don’t know any difference," he added.
"And so yes, I had to educate myself and yes, I had to get a better understanding. And yes, I had to lose some friends along the process, but I never wavered on loving my kids and trying to find space to get the chance to understand them."
Callum Jones