Hollywood Is Not Doing Enough for Trans People

A Transparent writer explains the show's innovative trans-affirmative hiring process.


Last year, TIME magazine declared on its cover that we had reached a transgender tipping point. But as she accepted the Emmy for Best Directing for a Comedy Series on Sunday night for her groundbreaking show Transparent, Jill Soloway offered a corrective: "We don't have a trans tipping point," she said, "we have a trans civil rights problem." Indeed, there's a disconnect between the stylish celebration of the transgender identity (see this Barney's campaignand the difficult realities that many transgender people face.

Most would say that Soloway, with her sensitive, complex, and elegant show is doing more than enough to help broaden perspectives and present a more realistic view of at least one transgender identity. But, behind the scenes, Soloway was doing even more, actively recruiting trans writers to work for the show, and, in the process, injecting a much needed dose of diversity into Hollywood. I spoke with Our Lady J, a transgender writer who joined the Transparent team at the start of the second season about the unusual process through which she arrived there.

Congrats on the Emmy win!

Thank you. I feel completely hung over, and yet I didn't have anything to drink.

Can you tell me a little about how you became a writer for Transparent?

I am a classical pianist by training, and from that I became a lyricist and a librettist. I had written a lot for theater and music but never for television. During season one of Transparent, Jill [Soloway] brought in a lot of trans people to assist with the show. But she also realized that she really needed a trans writer.

But there's only one trans writer working in television, which, she realized, was a problem. So she held an open call for short stories by trans writers; she really wanted train a group of people to write for television. Six of us ended up in the group that was selected from the short story submissions. ... We recreated a writer's room, and we wrote a pilot in a week. (The pilot was about a group of trans women in Pittsburgh who all came together to live in a house by supernatural means.) I got a call from Jill the next week, asking me to join the writer's room.

I imagine it was probably pretty heady being in that test-kitchen writers' room.

There's a pretty small community of trans artists, and we all knew each other. I was trying not to look at it like the Hunger Games. Jill really wanted to teach everyone more than anything else. She partnered with [the LGBT film festival] Outfest, and I believe all the writers were given the opportunity to join the Writer's Guild after the workshop. It was more about equipping writers to join the community than a contest.

Is there any particular lesson Jill was able to impart about writing?

She really taught us the logistics of writing for TV: how to break down an act, for example. We learned that everything is told from one of the characters' point of view ... so that the story is not static and so that everything has an emotional point to it. Everything that we write has to have an emotion behind it. If you don't know what that is, you're fucked.

Can you tell me a little more about yourself? When did you transition?

I began to transition in 2005, but I wasn't coming from the straight world. I had already come out as queer 10 years before, so I had been in the larger community for 20 years. … I felt as though I'd made peace with my sexuality, but not with my gender.

I'd always felt more female, but I still identify as more non-binary. Legally, I am female, but I do take up that space between genders, which for me is what being trans is. … I identify as trans because I want that freedom to move between the genders. There are a lot of other people who go from male to female and they don't want the trans label any more. They are just women. But that's not me.


Do you draw on that experience of transitioning to write for Transparent?

Maura and I are different in that Maura transitioned a lot later in life. (I was 27 when I transitioned.) Maura is in her sixties, so there's quite a few years difference. But I'm still pretty close with my family, and so the family dynamic is something Maura and I share. Questions like, 'How do you come out to your family?', arose for both of us. How do you continue to live with these people who knew you as a different person because you were protecting your [other] identity? On I Am Cait they keep saying, "you were lying." It's not like that—it' more like, "we were protecting ourselves from your ignorance."

Like Maura, I really identify with that, with the need to protect oneself. It's not clear what people will do when we become vulnerable, how we will continue a relationship with the people we love after we're shown our most vulnerable sides. When we're born, we're labeled male or female, and when we cross that line, we're met with suspicion and often ignorance.

Are there any similarities between your family and the Pfeffermans, the family at the center of Transparent?

My family are conservative Christians, much more religious than the Pfeffermans. They really didn't know what trans-ness was. Maura is lucky in that she has her daughter, Sarah, who'd been queer. She knew to say "this is who she is." She was down with the pronouns right away. ... That's something that I went through with my family—constantly correcting them until they got it right.

"Everyone wants a trans character on their show right now, but they're not following Jill's model of trans-affirmative hiring."

Do you think that the way in which you were brought into Transparent could provide a model for bringing more diversity into fields that lack it?

When you bring trans people into Hollywood, Hollywood needs to adjust. That's been difficult. I was pretty successful in my prior career. I was the first openly trans woman to play Carnegie Hall, which is to say, I had been a trans woman going into prominent cis spaces. I feel comfortable playing that role. But, logistically, Hollywood has not adjusted to accommodate trans people.

For instance, the Writer's Guild just voted against covering trans-specific health care. ... So on top of being a writer on a TV show, I have to advocate for my own health care. The system is just not ready. What's interesting, though, is that the system is ready to profit off our stories. Everyone wants a trans character on their show right now, but they're not following Jill's model of trans-affirmative hiring.

Can you tell me a few things about the second season?

Our secondary trans character are going to be explored more in depth. We learn a lot more about Maura's friends Davina and Shea, which I'm really proud of. We'll learn about love—everyone is given a lot more love.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

This post has been updated.

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