Mike Tyson says his daughter wanted to get physical with rapper Lil Boosie after he made comments about Dwyane Wade’s daughter, Zaya.
The boxing champing recently sat down with Vlad TV and said his daughter flew across the country from New York to Los Angeles to confront the rapper who made transphobic comments about the teenager, as reported by Revolt.
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“I learned that day that there’s a set of people, and they’re very serious about stuff like that,” Tyson told the host about homophobic and transphobic slurs during the video that aired on Dec. 20. “Those words are very offensive. It’s very offensive to them.”
He compared the language to making racist remarks against Black people.
In regards to his daughter, Tyson said that was just who she was.
“My daughter lives that life. She came from New York to this office right here to confront this guy, and she’s violent. I thought she came to see me. I thought she came to see her father and stepmother. She came to confront him physically,” said Tyson. “I had to take care of that. I was watching her, she wanted to physically grab this guy, and started attacking this guy. I had to come in, I was watching her. She explained herself, then he explained himself and it didn’t go as bad as I thought it was going to go.”
But he goes on to admit that in the past, he also had a hard time with expressing empathy for others.
“I didn’t know. I took it for granted. I was a guy and I was a sexist and I didn’t understand other people’s feelings,” Tyson said. He added after the experience, he saw his daughter in a different light.
“From that experience, to come from New York to here, to represent who she was, and to get physical, I have nothing but respect for that,” he said. “I talk totally different to her. She’s serious like that.”
Read More: Dwyane Wade shows gratitude to Mike Tyson for defending daughter Zaya
As previously reported by theGrio, Boosie was slammed for his comments after Wade and Zaya’s stepmother Gabrielle Union announced her name change. The Louisiana-born rapper took to Instagram to rant on the matter: ”Don’t cut his f*cking d*ck off!”
While at the gym on February 18th, Boosie recorded an Instagram video with a number of transphobic comments in response to Zaya’s decision to come out as a transgender girl.
“I gotta say something about this sh*t, bro. Dwyane Wade, you went too f*cking far, dawg,” he said in his IG video. “That is a male. A 12-year-old. At 12, they don’t even know what they next meal is gonna be. They don’t have sh*t figured out yet. He might meet a woman, anything, at 16 and fall in love with her. But his d*ck be gone—how he gon’—like, bruh, you going too far, dawg.”
Watch Tyson’s comments below.
Additional reporting by Corinne Dorsey.
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