Nicole Maines cast as the first trans superhero on TV
Trans activist Nicole Maines, 20, has been cast as the world’s first trans superhero. She’s set to appear on the CW show Supergirl as Nia Nal, aka Dreamer, a young trans woman poised to take over the CatCo newsroom. While LGBT+ representation has been hard to come by in superhero films on the silver screen on the CW’s “Arrowverse” Nal will be the 10th major LGBT+ character to appear in the series.
“I haven’t really wrapped my head around being a superhero, first of all, and then also being the first trans superhero on television,” Maines tells Variety.
“It feels fitting to say that with great power comes great responsibility,” the actress adds. “So I’m very, very hopeful, very excited, and at the same time I’m nervous, because I want to do it right.
“I think this character, Nia, is so good. She’s pure, she has this fierce drive to protect people in marginalized communities. I think she’s going to be a lot of fun, and I think folks are really going to like her.
“Most importantly, I want fans to take away an understanding of trans people—that we can be anybody, we can be whoever we want, we can do whatever we want, that we can be superheroes, because in many ways we are.
“Nia is so much more than ’the trans superhero. We’ve seen that. But trans people have lives outside of our gender identity and our transness. It’s time to start sharing those stories.”
Maines has appeared in an episode of Royal Pains and in the HBO documentary The Trans List, but is probably most famous as the plaintiff in the 2014 Maine court case Doe v. Clenchy. In the case, she successfully sued her school district for the right to use the female bathroom, it marked the first time an American state ruled that a trans student must be able to use the bathroom of their gender identity.
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