Kai Schreiber wants to be a supermodel. Period. She has been practising her walk in the kitchen for years, and her mum Naomi Watts has the videos to prove it. That image, a teenager commandeering the kitchen floor as a runway, her mum filming on her phone, says something so ordinary and so important at once that I keep returning to it.
Kai is 17, trans, and already walking for Valentino, Mugler, and Jean Paul Gaultier at Paris Fashion Week. She has spoken about growing up struggling with her gender identity, and about how that struggle shaped the hunger she has for fashion: the glamour, the icons, the feeling of becoming exactly who you knew you were supposed to be. "I always wanted to grow up and be a beautiful, glamorous, influential woman, like Marilyn," she told Interview Magazine. She got there. She is getting there, runway by runway.
What strikes me most in this story, though, is not the fashion. It is the parents.
What Liev Schreiber actually said
Liev Schreiber, talking to Variety, described the moment Kai asked her family to change her pronouns. "To be honest with you," he said, "it didn't feel like that big of a deal to me only because Kai had been so feminine for so long." He cannot pinpoint a single turning-point moment, because there was not one. "Kai was always who Kai is."
That sentence captures something that parents of trans children often tell me once they have found their footing: the child did not change. The language caught up. The recognition caught up. The world, slowly, caught up.
Schreiber is also honest about not having a blueprint to offer. When asked what advice he would give to other parents, he declined to give a prescription. "I don't know the answer for your kid. I don't know what it's like for you to be a trans dad. I don't know how you were brought up." That humility is not evasion; it is respect. Every family is different. Every child is different. What he did offer was this: trans teenagers are still teenagers. Feisty, opinionated, exhausting, wonderful. "They're such a pain so much of the time, and Kai is as feisty and outspoken as they come." He says it with unmistakable pride.
When the nepo-baby accusations came, he did not wring his hands or distance himself. "It doesn't matter, like, that's her life. She does what she wants with her life. And I'm super proud of her." On Instagram, watching her walk at Paris Fashion Week: "Stunner. Brava Kai."
What Naomi Watts actually did
Naomi Watts described herself, a little wryly, as having become "a bit of a momager." She acknowledged that supporting Kai's gender identity has involved "a big conversation," and that her advice to other parents would be to tailor that conversation to their own child, because there is no single script. What comes through clearly is that she showed up, kept showing up, and let Kai feel pride in what she is doing. "She's got her head on," Watts said, "and it was a nice way for her to feel pride about what she's doing."
That matters more than it might sound. So many trans young people describe the loneliness of feeling like a secret, like something to be managed or explained away. Kai does not sound like a secret. She sounds like someone whose parents are in the front row.
A community on the runway
Kai herself is clear-eyed about the climate she is working in. The trans community, she says, is "under such hostile attack." She draws strength from older trans women in fashion, from Hunter Schafer and Alex Consani, from the sense of a generation of trans women building something together. "It's so great that there's a strong community of us in the fashion world," she said. "It's really a doll takeover."
I love that. The lightness of it, alongside the seriousness. She knows what is at stake. She is not pretending the world is easy. And she is also 17, having the time of her life, walking in Paris, being celebrated, becoming who she always was.
Why this matters beyond celebrity
I know that stories about the children of famous people can feel remote from ordinary life. But I think Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts are doing something here that any parent can do, regardless of resources or fame: they are following their child's lead, speaking about her with straightforward pride, defending her without making her the centre of a cause, and trusting her to know her own life.
"Kai is such a fighter," Schreiber said. "It's important that she goes, 'Hey, I am trans,' and, 'Look at me.'" Yes. That is exactly right. And what makes it possible for a young trans person to stand up and say that, to walk out onto a runway or into a classroom or a family dinner and be fully themselves, is almost always the knowledge that somebody behind them already knows who they are, and thinks they are a stunner.