Zaya Wade continues to take the fashion industry by storm as she lands her first cover shoot for Dazed magazine’s Spring 2023 issue. While the 15-year-old is often seen on our social media feed, this is one of the first times people are actually hearing Wade share her thoughts on matters that have made her headlines since coming out as transgender in 2020. In one excerpt of her interview with the mag, Wade explains what being a role model to her fellow trans community means to her and how she hopes to use her platform to help other trans youth who are struggling with their identity.
”I’m a microphone. I am my own person and I have my own experiences, but for me, as a role model, I try to use my personal experience to broadcast the positives and also the negatives in life, because a lot of LGBTQ+ youth go unrecognized in every way,” she stressed. “I think I am here to share those experiences: to voice them, but also to enhance them. So the world can know, ‘We are here, we are queer, we are here to stay, and we aren’t going anywhere.”
#BetweenTakes with Zaya Wade 💛 From her party trick to the fictional character she most identifies with, find out more about our spring 2023 cover star in a round of quickfire questions on set for her shoot.
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— Dazed (@Dazed) March 15, 2023
Wade openly admitted that when she was growing up, she, too, struggled with self-acceptance because she didn’t think there were other people like her trying to navigate being a trans child, which led her to feel “isolated” from the world. She explained that while there’s a wide gap between the percentage of trans adults in contrast to trans children, there’s something courageous about embracing yourself despite the stress, pressure, and tension that comes with being openly trans at a young age.
“(You should) recognize that you have gone through a life-changing experience and that you deserve peace,” she told the magazine. “You deserve a moment – multiple moments – to step back and take some time to sit with yourself, and in any manner of way just escape negativity as much as you can.”
As fans will probably recall, her dad Dwyane Wade spoke about his daughter being trans in an interview on “The Ellen Degeneres Show” three years ago — a comment which many people were stunned by seeing that Wade was only 12 at the time. A lot of people took issue with the idea that a child who hadn’t even reached her teenage years was already making decisions as big as what her pronouns were going to be and how she identified herself.
Because we never need a reason to post an icon. We’re celebrating Zaya Wade today, tomorrow, and always! 👑 pic.twitter.com/GScqLUhaub
— Logo 🏳️🌈 (@LogoTV) February 27, 2023
Some argued that Wade should have waited until her late teens to make these decisions because children (and even teens) are likely to go through stages where they experiment with their fashion and other interests up until their early adult years, which is why her dad’s remarks were considered rather controversial at the time.
But Dwyane offered more clarity to the backlash he received for telling the world his daughter was trans when he later appeared on “Good Morning America,” telling Robin Roberts, “This is her life every day. This is no game to us.”
“We’re all about protecting her heart, we’re about protecting her joy and to do that, we have to support her.”