BURBANK, California — Nicole Maines understands the significance of her new Supergirl character by imagining what someone like Nia Nal/Dreamer would have meant to her when she was a child.
“If I had had a trans superhero, someone who looks like me wearing a cape, while growing up, that would have changed the game. That would have been an entire new level of validation in myself to think that I can be a superhero,” says the 21-year-old trans woman, who joins the CW action series in Season 4’s opener (tonight at 8).
Nia, who is inspired by and an ancestor of 30th-century DC Comics character Nura Nal/Dream Girl, marks TV’s first trans superhero. She’s introduced as a young reporter working for Kara Danvers/Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) at CatCo Worldwide Media. Her identity, her superpower (Dreamer is an alien “precog” who can dream the future) and her ice-blue suit will be revealed as the season progresses.
Producers were committed to adding a trans hero to the DC Comics TV universe headed by megaproducer Greg Berlanti (Arrow, The Flash), says executive producer Robert Rovner.
Nia’s identity as a trans woman is part of her origin story, says executive producer Jessica Queller, and is connected to “why and how she’s inherited these powers.” As with Kara in Season 1, she will have to come to terms with her power.
Nia’s role as a journalist is important, too, as Supergirl is “hoping to portray the press as heroic,” Queller says.
After spending a significant part of Season 3 off-world, Kara/ Supergirl & Co. are back in National City for the new season. Nia shows ambition and some youthful awkwardness, reminding Kara of an earlier version of herself. The new character also meshes well with the upcoming season’s focus on a growing campaign against aliens, including superheroes, that is led by a charismatic leader, Agent Liberty. The allegory parallels timely discussions about immigration and acceptance of people regardless of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation or gender identity.
Maines says Nia’s experience as an alien, like Supergirl, and a trans woman give her perspective on the treatment of marginalized communities. “It’s very relevant to today.”
In casting Nia, “we were looking for somebody who embodied the innocence, strength and intelligence of a young Kara, which was Nicole, who also happened to be a real-life superhero in our eyes,” Rovner says, referring to Maines’ activism.
Long before being cast in Supergirl, Maines was in the news as a winning litigant in a 2014 Maine Supreme Court case that gave people the right to use the bathroom of the gender with which they identify, a big advance for transgender rights in the U.S.
During her childhood, Maines and her family faced extreme public scrutiny and harassment, leading parents Kelly and Wayne to move Nicole and her twin brother, Jonas, to a different school. Their story became the basis for Amy Ellis Nutt’s 2015 book, Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family.
Maines, who later enrolled at the University of Maine, became an accomplished public speaker, giving an impressive TED Talk while just a teen and speaking at schools about her family’s experience, including her father’s slow but loving acceptance.
