So…
How come it’s so hard to get Boosie to shut the hell up? How long must we endure him popping up in our news feeds every few weeks with homophobic rant after homophobic rant before some honorable PR guy, friend, family member or colleague of the Baton Rouge, La., rapper gets him away from his social media accounts? Somebody, please do something about getting Torrence Hatch Jr. to shut his hatch for once.
Before I get into what Boosie Badazz did this time, let me just say that the problem isn’t just Boosie. The larger issue is him and everyone like him who just can’t seem to wrap their heads around the fact that they find themselves living in an era where more and more people are starting to evolve, educate ourselves and form new, informed understandings of how sexuality and gender identity work and that they aren’t as simple as society once thought.
Former NBA star Dwyane Wade, his wife, actress Gabrielle Union and their 12-year-old child, Zaya, have been trending in the news a lot as of late over a thing that really shouldn’t be news at all: parents’ acceptance of their child’s gender identity.
Wade and Union are “proud...parents of a child in the LGBTQ+ community — and we’re proud allies as well,” as Wade said during on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
“We take our roles and our responsibility as parents very seriously,” he explained. “When a child comes home with a question, when a child comes home with an issue, when a child comes home with anything, it’s our job as parents to listen to that, to give them the best information that we can, the best feedback that we can — and that doesn’t change because sexuality’s now involved in it.”
Speaking about the day Zaya came home and told her parents the pronouns she’d like to be referred to as, Wade said, “Once Zaya, our 12-year-old, came home — first Zion, I don’t know if everybody knows, originally named Zion, born as a boy — came home and said, ‘Hey, so I want to talk to you guys. I think going forward I am ready to live my truth, and I want to be referenced as ‘she’ and ‘her.’ I would love for you guys to call me Zaya.’”
So, that’s it. That’s the news: Dwyane Wade is a good father.
In a perfect world, Wade accepting his trans daughter’s identity would fall under the same level of news as “Father Babysits His Own Kids” to which sensible people would respond saying, “Oh, you mean parenting.”
But we don’t live in a perfect world, we live in the one where Boosie Badazz exists and has freedom of speech and access to recording equipment and Instagram.
“I gotta say something about this shit, bro. Dwyane Wade, you gone too fucking far, dawg,” Boosie said in a video posted on Tuesday. “That is a male. A 12-year-old. At 12, they don’t even know what they next meal gon’ be. They don’t have shit figured out yet. He might meet a woman, anything, at 16 and fall in love with her. But his dick be gone—how he gon’—like, bruh, you going too far, dawg.”
Despite the fact that Zaya has said exactly zero things about a sex-change operation, Boosie continued letting the world know he knows exactly zero things about trans identity.
“Don’t cut his dick off, bruh. Like, bruh, for real, if he gon’ be gay, let him be gay,” Boosie said. “But don’t cut his dick off, bruh. Don’t—and dress him as a woman, dawg. He’s 12 years old. He’s not up there year. He hasn’t made his final decisions yet. Don’t cut his fucking dick off, Dwyane Wade, bruh. You fucking trippin’, dawg.”
By age 12 I was pretty clear on the reality that I was male and that I was attracted to the opposite sex. It wasn’t a thing I had to learn, it was something I knew inherently. I imagine if you asked Boosie, he’d tell you the same of his own lived experience as a 12-year old child. So why is it so hard for him and others like him to imagine that people of non-heteronormative sexuality or people whose gender identity falls somewhere on a spectrum outside of a binary, come by their understandings of themselves just as naturally as us hetero, cis-gender folk do? Why can’t Boosie imagine that if Zaya were to meet a woman and fall in love with her when she turns 16, that she would still be very much capable of having a mutually consented relationship with her, penis or no?
At this point, I fear the easier question is the one I started with: Why can’t Boosie just shut it and mind his own damn business?