Supergirl’s new transgender heroine makes a must hear speech
The latest episode of the superhero teen drama Supergirl is highly political. The writers are using the concept of alien refugees on Earth (Superman and Supergirl obviously being two of them) as a starting point for presenting and discussing xenophobia and the fear of “The Other”.
The aliens from other planets takes the role human refugees and “illegals” play in the current American political landscape, but the bigoted hatred shown by American racists is the same.
Now that we know that the Trump administration is planning to remove the official recognition of the real identity of transgender people – a reflection of a similar hatred of the unknown and the unfamiliar – this episode comes right on time, because this news season also presents Nia Nal, the first transgender hero in the DC universe. She is a new journalist in the newspaper Supergirl is working for.
This episode includes a nasty scene where the identity of one alien is revealed in a pizza restaurant where Nia Nal is buying her coffee. The man behind the desk becomes openly hostile when he realizes that the man ordering pizzas is from another planet, and only Nia Nal stops this from becoming very violent.
In the scene embedded below Nia Nal tries to convince her editor, James Olsen, to write an editorial condemning the increasing racist violence, and she does so by explaining the similarities between xenophobia and transphobia.
This is a clear call for action in a dark time.
Nia Nal is played by transgender actress Nicole Maines. I wrote about her two years ago in the blog post Identical twins: one boy, one girl.
