EJ Johnson, the child of NBA legend Magic Johnson, can relate to Zaya Wade, the transgender daughter of former professional basketball player Dwyane Wade.
Johnson, 33, was a guest on the Tuesday (March 10) episode of Reality With the King and spoke to host Carlos King about their childhood and relating to Zaya, 18. While EJ is queer and gender-fluid and prefers they/them pronouns (though, they say in the interview, “‘she’ is cool”), Zaya identifies as a woman and came out as transgender in 2020 when she was 12 years old. EJ, who Johnson shares with his wife, Cookie Johnson, publicly came out in 2013, three years after coming out to their family.
Around the 45-minute mark of the video below, EJ said that they’ve met Zaya twice, and has encouraged the teenager to reach out if she needed guidance.
“She went to my high school as well, so we have some similarities,” EJ said.
“It's one of those things where it's like, there's nothing really I can say or do, because that's your journey,” EJ continued. “And they also said some horrible and stupid things about her, and the same thing they [said] were the horrible stupid things they were saying about me. So it's like, here we are again.”
EJ added that those negative comments stem not from anything wrong with them or Wade, but instead from the critics’ own internal anxieties.
“I'm not going up against anything that I actually really need to be concerned about, because these are all everybody else's fears and everybody else's concerns and everybody else's viewpoints of the world that are being challenged by somebody living their truth or living their life the way they want to live it,” they said. “It's just absurd. But I'm happy that she's happy.”
To deter homophobic and queerphobic remarks, in 2024, Zaya and her father launched the LGBTQIA+ friendly platform Translatable to keep queer, non-binary and trans youth safe online.