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If you think you already know Nicole Maines’ story, chances are you haven’t got a clue.
Years before the actress shot to superheroic stardom as Dreamer on DC Comics’ live-action Supergirl TV series, her personal life was already a matter of public record due to the anti-transgender discrimination she faced as a teenager. Her family’s precedent-setting lawsuit against her former school district, and her conservative father’s rocky journey toward acceptance, became the subject of journalist Amy Ellis Nutt’s 2015 bestseller Becoming Nicole.
Nutt’s book presented Maines’ transition to millions of readers as the catalyst for an inspirational story about an all-American family, quickly catapulting her into LGBTQ+ advocacy on the national stage. But as Maines reveals in her new memoir It Gets Better... Except When It Gets Worse, out today from Dial Press, her fairy tale reads a lot more like a Hans Christian Andersen story, filled not just with joy but harrowing and often traumatic experiences, like her struggle to repair her mental health after what she describes as a botched bottom surgery. (And yes, she names names.)
This is Maines’ story in her own words for the first time, which is to say it reads like finishing a bottle of wine with your most chaotic friend who also happened to appear on Yellowjackets. Between It Gets Better… and Bad Dream, her debut graphic novel with artist Rye Hickman released earlier this year, it feels like 2024 is the start of a new era for Maines — one in which she’s cast off the shackles of being a “role model” to simply speak her mind, come what may.
Ahead of the book’s release, Maines caught up with Them to talk about finding catharsis through storytelling, the crushing politicization of trans youth, and her real secret origin story as a fanfic writer.
Despite all of the ink that’s been spilled about you being a “trans trailblazer,” you note in the book that you haven’t really felt in control of telling your own story. I think that’s especially important for people who felt like they knew you from Becoming Nicole to hear. Do you feel like you’ve managed to reclaim some of that lost agency through your storytelling?
Nicole Maines: “Reclaiming my time.” 100%. Yeah, I do. I think this is true of a lot of trans people, and I think especially of trans youth. We tend to get spoken over and about rather than to. I remember feeling so confused about [that] growing up, especially as all of this fallout was happening about the bathrooms. Everyone was talking about, “Oh, the children. Won’t someone think of the children?” I’m like, "Well, will you talk to the children? Because they’re fine, we don’t give a shit. These are the girls I’m sharing a bed with at sleepovers. We’re not the ones with the problem, and if you would just stop fearmongering for five minutes…” But they don’t really care.
It did feel very important for me to get to say how I felt about everything — to say what I wanted without feeling beholden to being “good representation” or being a role model. As I started doing more advocacy and started using my voice, there was so much that I couldn’t do or say. My dad always told me I had to be “Taylor Swift-clean.”
So it was really good for me to get to just say how I felt, talk about whatever I wanted, and go on, as we see, a lot of digressions.
I mean, as a reader with some sort of ADHD —
Listen, this is for the girls and the gays with the ADHD. This is who I am, everybody, and this is how I exist. I go on really weird digressions. I’ll get up on a soapbox at the drop of a hat. I really can’t go… Have you been watching — again, digression — Agatha All Along?
I need to get caught up.
There’s this moment where they’re doing a summoning spell, and Kathryn Hahn is like, “Someone not too political.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s me out. Oh, well.” I blame my mom. I truly cannot go five minutes without being like, “You know what the problem is? Men.”
My favorite parts of the book are the sections where I go on these digressions. I talk about Hans Christian Andersen and the unrequited gay love story that brought us Little Mermaid, and we talk about how my mom was struggling to find information about trans people, and I say, “Well, let’s stop for a second and look into that. Why is there no information? Oh, because the Nazis burned all of it,” and we talk about the Magnus Hirschfeld Institute of Sexology.
There’s [also] a section where I get to stop and thank Black women in media. I met Alison Sealy-Smith at San Diego Comic-Con, who is the voice of Storm, and I got to tell her, “Yeah, watching X-Men: The Animated Series and seeing Storm, I was like, ‘Oh, that’s the blueprint.’” It was her, Raven-Symoné, Brandy, and Whitney in Cinderella — all of the things that were telling me I was a woman were these Black women on my TV. So I got to write a little blurb about that, like, “You guys are queens, and thank you, because I don’t know where I’d be [otherwise].”
You’re in a really interesting position, where you have the experience of transitioning socially and medically at a relatively young age—
In the brief window of being able to do so without the oversight of the federal government.
Right. And now you are a trans adult who can also speak to that experience. What was it like going back and reassessing all of that, in light of what you’re feeling as an adult?
It’s frustrating because it feels, for me, so easy. It feels like I should be able to just be like, “Hey, guys, I am walking proof that what you’re saying is a non-issue. We’re fine. I’m normal. I am able to do what I like, and contribute to society, and I’m not causing problems, and I’m not the one who’s fucking shooting up schools.” Right?
It boggles the mind and boils the blood that — despite what seems like overwhelming proof that if you just let trans people be themselves, everything is fine — we’re still running into all of these issues. We’re still running into the, “Oh, but the sports. Oh, but what about hormone blockers? They’re just so experimental, and we just don’t possibly know what’s going to happen down the road.” And I’m like, “I do. Nothing.” But they’re not interested in listening to us, or our experiences, or our expertise.
I really enjoyed, as a fangirl, reading about the different ways that fandom influenced your life, long before you got cast on Supergirl. Some of us already knew that you are one of Bubbline’s strongest defenders, but you reveal in the book you were not just a shipper, but a ship artist.
Oh, not just a ship artist. In my senior year of high school, for my creative writing class, I was submitting Bubbline fanfiction to be read. I made my classmates read my high school AU bullshit. They were lab partners, and they don’t like each other.
And they were lab partners.
And they were lab partners.
That’s incredible.
Maybe trans people are sick. [laughs]
In the book, you go into your sometimes contentious relationship with fandom, especially queer fandom, and you have a lot of very hard truths to share.
I think we have to be able to talk about it. As much as we love to call out people “across the aisle” or whatever, we have to be able to talk among ourselves, and be like, “Hey, guys. This behavior is actually fucked up.”
I think that’s another reason why it was so important to mention that I come from fandom, from consuming that media, writing the fan fiction, drawing the fan art, reading the fan fiction, and loving this material. But then getting to cross over to the other side, and experiencing the hate and seeing what it does to my friends and coworkers — it’s like, I expected this from straight people, but we should know better. We should know more than anybody not to send a death threat. We know what that does to people. Why are we perpetrating that?
I understand that hurt people hurt people, but we have the ability to not do that, and that is a choice that we make. Because as much as we talk about how toxic those kinds of fans are, we can also recognize that it comes from us too, and it’s not okay.
The tone that you strike in the book is so conversational throughout, even when we’re being brought into experiences that were incredibly traumatic. Especially the sections about your surgeries, where you open up about needing revisions. As you explain, there’s a lot of anxiety about sharing stories like yours even within trans community spaces because nobody wants to give ammunition to people who will go out and say, “These surgeries are dangerous.”
Exactly. It becomes impossible to have any kind of organic conversation when you are beholden to representing a certain idea about it. That’s why it’s so exhausting having these conservative outlets breathing down our necks, because then it becomes impossible to talk about any real issues. Like, yes, we should be talking about medical malpractice! That is a real fucking thing that affects a lot of trans people! But when it gets twisted into throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and “nobody should be able to have healthcare,” how the fuck does that help anybody?
It just leads us to suffering in silence because we don’t want to be part of the problem. We don’t want to give ammunition to anybody, and like I say in the book, nobody wants to have their medical trauma used against them. Nobody wants to have that weaponized. It is already such a difficult, scary thing to admit for yourself that you were taken advantage of, that you were hurt, and that you were lied to.
Even when you get revision — and this is something that I still deal with to this day — yes, it’s exponentially better than it was, but it’s still not as good as it should have been if I had gone to someone competent the first time. And that is a feeling of loss, and of theft, that you’re never really going to be able to reconcile. You have had this one opportunity taken from you, and now all you can do is try to pick up the pieces, and that’s already hard to do without some asshole trying to use that for political points.
What was your process like in putting together those chapters in particular? As you said, that’s such a deeply personal trauma for you. What did you need to go through to feel safe and secure in sharing it?
Several lawyers. My lawyers, the book’s lawyers, the third party... especially when we’re dealing with someone who is especially litigious, you want to make sure that what you’re saying is factual, and it’s not a hit piece or anything like that. It’s saying, “This was my experience. This is what happened to me. Do with that information what you will.”
That’s the other part of it: You can’t talk about it because you don’t want to give people political points, but [also] because you don’t want to be sued. It’s just hard. It’s scary. I didn’t talk about it for so long because of all of that.
Were you able to find any kind of catharsis in finally getting that out there, or was it more like, “I just need to share this for the sake of getting this off my chest”?
I think both. There was definitely a kind of catharsis in just finally being able to say, "This is something that happened to me, and I’m not going to be bullied, and I’m not going to be intimidated, because I’m bigger than you now.” I’m going to share my truth. As I was writing it, I was telling myself, “I am prepared for this to become a legal issue,” and I will not be surprised if it is.
Trans people who write memoirs are so often put in the position of catering to, or educating a presumed cis audience. I’ve talked to other authors about this, and you make it pretty clear that is not something that interests you.
That’s what Becoming Nicole was for. We got one, bitch.
I would much rather know what you want young trans people — high school, college, coming into their adulthood — to take away from this book, especially now that many of them are finding themselves in some of the same political crosshairs that you talk about.
I think the thing that I want young, or all, trans people to take from this book is: You are allowed to not be okay. I think it is not a secret that shit’s hard for us right now, it’s really scary for us right now, and I don’t know what’s going to fucking happen. It’s exhausting, and you’re allowed to be sad, you’re allowed to be afraid. You’re allowed to be fucking angry. Lord knows I am, more often than not. I just turn on the news, and I’m like, “How is this still a conversation that we’re having?”
You are allowed to feel any way you want to about this, and you do not have to be happy [or] joyful. It’s good if you are, but it’s okay if you’re not. We get inundated with so much “it gets better” messaging, and I think it just is important to keep in mind the ebb and the flow, the swing of the pendulum. It will get better again, I do believe that, but sometimes it do be getting worse.
At the very least, I hope it makes them chuckle, because I try to be funny a couple of times. I don’t necessarily have answers and I don’t necessarily know if this book is helpful, but I did try to be funny.
This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It Gets Better... Except When It Gets Worse: And Other Unsolicited Truths I Wish Someone Had Told Me is available now via Dial Press.
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