Nicole Maines

Nicole Amber Maines is an American actress and transgender rights activist. Prior to her acting career, she was the anonymous plaintiff in the Maine Supreme Judicial Court case Doe v. Regional School Unit 26, in which she argued her school district could not deny her access to the female bathroom for being transgender. The court ruled in 2014 that barring transgender students from the school bathroom consistent with their gender identity is unlawful, the first such ruling by a state court. As an actress, Maines played Nia Nal on The CW superhero series Supergirl (2018–2021) in the fourth through sixth seasons. She is the first to portray a transgender superhero on television. Maines and her brother Jonas were adopted at birth as identical twins by Kelly and Wayne Maines in 1997; one of their biological parents was Kelly's second cousin. Though they spent their early years in Gloversville, New York, they grew up in Portland, Maine. Maines was assigned male at birth and started showing signs of gender variance at a young age; when she was two years old, Maines reportedly asked her mother questions like "When do I get to be a girl?" She preferred playing with toys intended for girls and identified with female characters in cartoons and movies. Maines herself said she knew she was not a boy as young as three years old and started explicitly telling her family who she was by the age of four. Her brother, Jonas, accepted her gender identity from a young age. While the two were still in elementary school, Jonas reportedly told their father, "Face it, Dad, you have a son and a daughter."