Trans activist lands role on TV’s ‘Supergirl’

Transgender activist and actress Nicole Maines has landed a role as TV’s first transgender superhero on the CW’s “Supergirl.”

Maines caught the public’s attention in 2014, when she successfully sued her school district to allow trans children to use the bathroom aligned with their gender identity. She was the subject of “Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family,” a popular book that tells the story of Maines’s coming out, and starred in “The Trans List,” an HBO documentary about the American trans community.

Maines’s casting was announced at San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday.

“It feels fitting to say, ‘With great power, comes great responsibility,’ ” Maines told Variety. “I’m nervous because I want to do it right.”

LGBTQ advocacy organization GLAAD in 2017 identified only 17 regular and recurring trans characters on television. Of those characters, nine were trans women, four were trans men and four were nonbinary. 

“I’ve been doing a lot of auditions lately because a lot of different shows have been really eager to tell the story of transgender people,” Maines said at Comic-Con, according to The New York Times. “It seems only fitting that we have a trans superhero for trans kids to look up to.”

“I wish there was a trans superhero when I was little,” she added.

On “Supergirl,” Maines will play a reporter who befriends the show’s title character, superhero Kara Danvers, who is played by Melissa Benoist.

“Our show is all about inclusion and representation,” said Jessica Queller, an executive producer on the show, according to the Times. “It seems the perfect moment in our culture to introduce a trans female superhero.” 

After receiving pushback from LGBTQ activists this month, cisgender actress Scarlett Johansson resigned from a role where she was slated to play a transgender man. Activists said trans characters should be played by trans actors, considering how few roles there are for them in general. 

“With trans folks, we have a lot of people accusing us of just playing dress up for whatever reason, and that’s not true,” Maines said in the Variety interview. “And so having trans people play trans roles shows that we are valid in our identity and we deserve to exist as we do. And so when we have cisgender actors play trans characters, it further that stereotype that we are playing dress up, which is not true.”