In a scene from “Transparent,” the television series created by Jill Soloway, a women’s-studies professor stands before a room of listless undergraduates, haranguing them in the accusatory tone favored by a certain strain of academic. “Because women bled without dying, men were frightened!” the professor—played by Soloway, wearing a tent of a top and a pink dreadlock in her bun—says. “The masculine insists to cut things up with exclamation points—which are in and of themselves small rapes, the way an exclamation point might end a sentence and say, ‘Stop talking, woman!’ ”
At the back of the classroom, Syd, played by Carrie Brownstein, turns to her friend Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffman) and asks, “Have you ever been raped by an exclamation point?”
“Actually, once I was gang-raped: question mark, exclamation point, and semicolon,” Ali replies.
“That’s brutal,” Syd says stonily. “It’s very underreported.”
In person, Jill Soloway looks nothing like a dowdy professor. She looks more like a wide-eyed cartoon doe. Her resting facial expression is curious, attentive, intent. She has a delicate frame, brown hair that falls to her jaw, and big brown eyes. Several of her friends describe her as “a doer.” Amazon, “Transparent” ’s producer and distributor, has a series of governing principles; Soloway’s favorite is “bias for action.” She didn’t want to sit around talking when I visited her, in Los Angeles, on a warm afternoon in late October. It was a month after she won the Emmy for best director, and her star, Jeffrey Tambor, won another one, for his portrayal of Maura Pfefferman, a transgender woman who has come out at the age of sixty-eight. Soloway wanted to walk up and down the hills of Silver Lake, the hip, idyllic neighborhood where she lives, and which provides the setting for much of her show.
Sometimes, though, Soloway sounds not entirely unlike that women’s-studies professor she played. “A patriarchal society can’t really handle that there’s such a thing as a vagina,” she said. “The untrustworthy vagina that is discerning-receiving.” Soloway, who recently turned fifty, was wearing leggings and blue nail polish and a baseball cap that said “Mister.” She sped past a stretch of Craftsmen bungalows, whose front yards were studded with bicycles, jade plants, and toys. “So you can want sex, you can want to be entered, and then a minute later you can say, ‘Stop—changed my mind,’ ” she continued. “That is something that our society refuses to allow for. You don’t feel like it now? You’re shit out of luck. You know why? Because you have a pussy! To me, that is what’s underneath all this gender trouble: most of our laws are being formed by people with penises.”
Most of our entertainment, of course, has also been formed by people with penises, and Soloway is trying to change that: through her hiring practices, her choice of subject matter, and the way she thinks and acts at work. “We’re taught that the camera is male,” she said, turning to walk uphill, backward, to tone a different part of her legs. “But I’m not forcing everybody to fulfill something in my head and ‘Get it right—now get it more right.’ ” Directing with “the female gaze,” she asserted, is about creating the conditions for inspiration to flourish, and then “discerning-receiving.”
On set, Soloway thinks of her job as akin to being a good mom: “Kids come home from school, want to put on a play in the back yard. You help them build a stage; you make sure they take breaks, have a snack.” (Soloway has two sons, Isaac, nineteen, and Felix, seven.) Jeffrey Tambor told me, “I have never experienced such freedom as an actor before in my life. Often, an actor will walk on a set and do the correct take, the expected take. Then sometimes the director will say, O.K., do one for yourself. That last take, that’s our starting point.”
The cast talks about “Transparent” as a “wonderful cult,” but Soloway disputes this. “It’s not a cult,” she says. “It’s feminism.” Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: “We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?”
Soloway describes herself as “seditious.” Her production company is called Topple, as in “topple the patriarchy.” Ultimately, this trait has contributed to her success: while “Transparent” is, at its core, a family drama about California Jews who have a standing order at Canter’s Deli and who bicker about which of the siblings should inherit the house where they grew up, it is also a radical exploration of gender and sexuality, unlike anything that preceded it on television.
But for many years Soloway’s insurrectionary tendencies were a career obstacle. In 2011, after almost two decades as a television writer, Soloway was broke, with two kids, trying to recover from the recent writers’ strike and the recession. Then her old friend Jane Lynch, who was starring on “Glee,” told her about a job on the show, and Soloway went to meet with the producers. “Finally, here’s this moment where I’m meeting on ‘Glee,’ ” Soloway said. “Ryan Murphy wants to hire me. I’ve been best friends with Jane Lynch for about three decades—we’re sisters. It’s happening.” As Soloway drove home from the meeting, her agent called to say, “Pop the champagne—they loved you.” A week later, he called again: Murphy had heard that Soloway was “difficult,” and wasn’t going to give her the job. The agent said he’d send a check to tide her over.
That night, Soloway sat in the bathtub, while her husband, Bruce Gilbert, a music supervisor for film and television, brushed his teeth. She remembers telling him, “ ‘I don’t want to use the money to pay off our debt. I want to be a director, and I want to make a film with it and get into Sundance. I want to double down on me.’ And Bruce was, like, ‘O.K.’ ” Then, just as Soloway was making the leap to directing her own material, her father called one afternoon and came out as transgender.
When Jill and her sister, Faith, were young, their family moved to the South Side of Chicago. Their parents—Harry, a psychiatrist who grew up in London, and Elaine, who had worked as a teacher to put Harry through medical school—wanted to raise the girls in a diverse neighborhood. They chose South Commons, a development of brown brick town houses erected by urban planners to attract members of various income brackets and races. Elaine flourished: within a month, she’d become the editor of the community newsletter, and she later worked as a press officer for the mayor of Chicago. Harry grew increasingly melancholic and withdrawn. He “missed most of the conversation,” according to Jill, because he was always “listening to a Cubs game, with a skin-colored knob in his ear and beige cord down his shirt and into his pants pocket.” Faith told me, “We didn’t have a dad who was curious about us—but, then, I didn’t see too many fathers being too into their kids.”
Initially, South Commons succeeded as an integrated community, but over the years white flight took hold. “No one wanted to be the last white family in the school—except our parents,” Jill recalls.
The Soloway sisters were accepted, Faith told me: “I was treated so sweetly by the kids—I was like their little white pet.” But she and Jill stood out.“I remember the feeling of going on field trips and getting off the bus where the world was white,” she said. For Jill, the experience provided “my most enduring view of myself, that of the Outsider.” At school and at home, Jill and Faith—who are eighteen months apart—formed a united front. “My parents had their own TVs and got together for meals and arguments,” Jill has written. “There was only one perfect marriage in our home, and it was between me and Faith.”
The two watched lots of television: “Charlie’s Angels,” “Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island,” “The Brady Bunch.” Jill began directing—gathering friends to star in stories that she made up. Robin Ruzan, Jill’s friend of thirty years, said, “We used to spend hours and hours filming stuff. If you had walked in on us making dumb videos, you wouldn’t know there was any difference in Jill’s level of commitment than if you’d walked onto the set of ‘Transparent.’ ”
Adolescence was a fraught time for Jill. For one thing, she told me, “I was a girl with huge tits—I mean, I was just my tits.” (She has since had a breast reduction. “There are still people who say to me, ‘Your tits are huge.’ I’m, like, you don’t even fucking know.”) She had a contentious relationship with her father, and accumulated “mountains of resentment” toward him. “By the time I graduated college, the only conversations that didn’t escalate into a fight were those about the weather,” she has written. There was always something unresolved and hidden about Harry, and, as Ruzan observes, “Jill’s nature is to get to the bottom of everything. She’s investigative.”
Jill was a communications major at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Faith studied theatre at Indiana University. After graduation, the sisters returned to Chicago, where Faith worked as a music director for Second City, and Jill worked in production on commercials and movies. In their mid-twenties, around the time that their parents were separating, the sisters created a show at the Annoyance Theatre called “The Real Live Brady Bunch”: verbatim reënactments of old episodes, starring Andy Richter and Jane Lynch, who were then unknown local comedians. The show caught on, and they toured the country with it, performing at the Village Gate, in New York, and the Westwood Playhouse, in Los Angeles. “We had a mini fame bubble,” Jill said. They were pursued by agents and producers, and wrote a pilot for HBO about a female superhero called Jewess Jones.
The pilot never got made, and the bubble floated away. Faith settled in Boston, where she brought up a daughter with her girlfriend and ran a theatre program for at-risk youth. Jill moved to a pot farm in Cazadero, California, a small town near the Russian River which she describes as a kind of counterculture Eden: “Verdant, moist, little tiny grocery store.” She got stoned and sold pot and wrote a novella and some pilots, along with a screenplay about “a world where all the genders are switched around.” After a few years, she met a painter named Johnny, with whom she had a “soul connection.” They had a loose and romantic life together. “We drove around the country—we got a white pimp car with a purple stripe,” Soloway said. “We were both trying to create artists’ lives.”
At thirty, Soloway decided that she wanted to be a mother, but she didn’t want to have a conventional family. “I was thinking of it as a single mom,” she told me. In her mind, “artists are single moms and single moms are artists.” But most artists who are single moms do not have much money, so, not long after her first son was born, Soloway got a job as a writer on “The Steve Harvey Show.” “Any show would have been fine,” she said. “I just wanted to be a TV writer.” She was there for only one season before a producer told her, “You need to go work on a white show.”
Soloway’s next job was writing for “Nikki,” which she calls “the worst sitcom in the world”—a domestic comedy about a Las Vegas showgirl who’s married to a professional wrestler. Then, in 2002, Alan Ball, the creator of “Six Feet Under,” read one of her short stories, a surreal rant about the indignities of life as a personal assistant, titled “Courtney Cox’s Asshole.” “I remember thinking, Oh, my God—who is this person?” Ball told me. “After reading that, I was, like, O.K., she is really going to write the hell out of Claire and Brenda.” They worked together until the show’s finale, in 2005. Soloway went on to collaborate with Diablo Cody on “United States of Tara,” a series about a woman with multiple personalities—both male and female. “Diablo and I went one year riding on our little feminist dreams,” Soloway said. But the network didn’t like their vision of the show. “It kind of exploded,” Soloway said. “I got fired, and they brought some dudes in.”
This was the beginning of a downward slide. “It starts with: You’re fired from ‘United States of Tara.’ You’re fired from ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ because Shonda”—Rhimes, who went on to create “Scandal”—“doesn’t really feel like you’re giving it your all. But, O.K., wait, you’re going to go work with HBO! No, you’re not—they’re actually going to work with this person Lena Dunham, and everybody wonders if you guys are related. Or: ‘She really seems like she was sprung from your rib, Jill.’ People were, like, it’s you, but younger and better.” It was then that Soloway had the doomed meeting about “Glee”—in what, as it happens, is now her office on the Paramount lot.
Soloway looks at every experience she had in Hollywood —“all the things that seemed like catastrophes”—as preparation. “I was getting ready to make this show, and I didn’t know it,” she told me. She had always been obsessed with gender, and wanted to investigate the mystery of intimacy. Then her father called to say that he was a woman named Carrie, and the most intimate patriarchy in her life toppled.
“The first response, the first sharing of emotion that Jill and I had, was shock and silliness,” Faith recalled. “Like, This is the silliest thing I’ve ever heard.” For Faith, the next experience was incomprehension: “I was, like, Who is this new person? Who have I talked to for forty years of life?” But, as a lesbian, she felt a duty to be supportive, and in some ways the experience was a welcome clarification. For her sister, it was something else. “It just rocked her world,” Faith said. “For Jill, it was: This is why I am the way I am. This is why I have these feelings about being female in the world.”
“Femininity is like alcohol,” Soloway told me. “I never know how much to take before I throw up.” In “Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants,” a book of essays that she published in 2005, she wrote, “Pointy shoes make me want to cry. Anything Sarah Jessica Parker ever wore makes me want to cry.” She describes “an elemental nausea about the very fact of my gender,” brought on by “a truth I wanted to hide from: that being a woman meant being watched. I wanted to be a watcher.” Soloway talks a lot in that book about her fascination with women who are “dick candy,” like strippers and porn stars: women who are watched because they have mastered—or are mastered by—the appearance of flawless femininity.
As Carrie was coming out, Jill revisited a film script that she’d started years earlier, about two Silver Lake moms who decide to get their husbands a hooker as a Father’s Day present. The plot shifted as Soloway rewrote it: a bored, angst-ridden mom, Rachel, befriends a nineteen-year-old hooker, McKenna, and invites her to be her son’s live-in nanny. Soloway describes the film, “Afternoon Delight,” as a feminist tract: “The divided feminine. What do we owe each other as women? Especially if we are classically oppositional icons: mother and whore. And how does that harm us to be separating these two parts of ourselves to compete for access to the male gaze?”
But “Afternoon Delight,” which won Soloway the best-director award at Sundance, is both subtler and more unsettling than she makes it sound—an investigation of the selfishness that can creep into what purports to be altruism. After McKenna has sex with one of the fathers in the neighborhood, she is ejected from Rachel’s home—cast out by the older, wealthier, luckier people she was summoned to stimulate (and by Soloway, who never returns her to the narrative). It is hard to feel much sympathy for Rachel when she tells her husband, “I’m sorry I threw a bomb in the middle of our life—our beautiful life.”
Soloway sees something different: a recognition that, to some extent, we all do what Carrie Soloway did—subsume parts of ourselves in order to exist within a family. “When I look at ‘Afternoon Delight’ now, and Rachel making a space for McKenna in the house, it’s, like, Was I writing a yearning for Carrie to come out?” she said. Carrie Soloway told me, “Jill was very angry with me at first for keeping it a secret all those years—but you had to then.” Jill now calls Carrie “Moppa”—a combination of “mom” and “poppa”—just as the Pfefferman children refer to Maura. When Soloway won her Emmy, she thanked “the Goddess,” and she thanked her “moppa, for coming out.”
“Transparent” is a product of the female gaze: Season 1 was directed exclusively by women, and four of the five primary characters are female. But it also reflects the gaze of a child—the perspective, colored by Soloway’s experience, of the Pfefferman siblings, who are by turns baffled, disappointed, besotted, and enraged by the person who raised them.
Jeffrey Tambor’s Maura is a retired professor who has, after decades of dreaming about it, finally grown her sparse gray hair past her shoulders. She wears flowing pants and long skirts and has a broad frame and a poignant ungainliness. She is wary, but also prone to radiant bursts of daring and disarming maternal love. She doesn’t want to live in the big, expensive, modern house in Pacific Palisades where she spent decades being a distant father and husband and “dressing up like a man.” She wants her children to live there while she finds out where she belongs. At nearly seventy, Maura has been reborn.
One consequence of rebirth is a second coming of age, and both Maura and her children act out with the heedless egocentrism of adolescents. The eldest sibling, Sarah, leaves her husband to pursue an affair with her college girlfriend, after they reunite at the school that their children attend. In the second season, their relationship moves from illicit to domestic, and Sarah finds herself trapped in her own escape plan, as restless and unmoored as ever. Her brother, Josh, keeps accidentally getting women pregnant and pitching fits: he throws a chair at his boss, and shrieks at other drivers from behind the wheel. Ali, the youngest, drifts between interests and lovers, experimenting with drugs, lesbianism, yellow eye shadow, and academia. (“You can not do anything!” Maura explodes at her.)
The upside of immaturity is guileless delight, and “Transparent” has a child’s sense of amazement about the world—especially secret places where different rules apply. Maura seems free for the first time at a sylvan cross-dressing camp, where she bikes along the dirt road wearing a purple dress. The Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival—which ended this summer, after forty years, largely because of conflicts over whether trans women ought to be included—is re-created in the second season as a muddy, magical oasis where women receive visions by staring into bonfires. “I’m always trying to bring the concept of play into the female gaze,” Soloway told me.
There is even an innocence to the sex scenes, which are radical and plentiful. Sarah gets a spanking—but in the forest, with a grin on her face. In Season 2 (which will become available online on December 11th), Maura has sex for the first time since her transition, with an earth mother played by Anjelica Huston. She says aloud what so many virgins have said in their minds: “I don’t know what to do.”
I walked into the den of Soloway’s rambling house one morning as she was watching that scene on her computer. Originally, the Huston character felt Maura’s erection pressing against her and said, seductively, “What do we have here?” To which Maura replied, “We have a penis.” One of Soloway’s writers—a transgender woman—had suggested that Maura might not think of her genitals that way anymore, and that she ought to say, “We have a big clit.”
Soloway looked at me intently, discerning-receiving, and said, “What do you think? Too much?” (In the end, both lines were cut.)
Like Maura, the transgender movement in this country is just coming out, even though it has a long secret history. “Transparent” both reflects and advances its agenda, and the people who make the show feel an acute responsibility. “It’s an extremely tough line to walk,” Bridget Bedard, the head writer, told me. “We’re making a comedy—or a ‘trauma-dy,’ we’ve started saying—and comedy comes from people being fallible.” But they want to make the characters believably flawed without reinforcing stereotypes: “Like, a trans woman looking in the mirror and crying—don’t do that.”
Every decision on the show is vetted by Rhys Ernst and Zackary Drucker, trans activists and artists whose work about their relationship appeared in the most recent Whitney Biennial. “We monitor the politics of representation—if we catch things in the writing stage, it’s kind of optimal because then there’s time to shape it,” Drucker told me. “We’re kind of starting over with ‘Transparent,’ and with the trans tipping point in general.”
Despite the uniformity of experience suggested by the label L.G.B.T., the gay community has been accepted into American life and politics in a way that trans people have not. The city of Houston elected its first lesbian mayor in 2009, but when she passed a broad anti-discrimination ordinance—which addressed race, age, and sexual orientation as well as gender identity—opponents launched a campaign with the slogan “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms,” and voters easily repealed the measure.
But, if trans people are scapegoats for the right, they are also requiring the left to undertake a momentous shift in thinking. “We’re asking the whole world to transition with us to a less binary way of being,” Drucker said. “It’s the next step in the fight for gender equality: removing the habit of always qualifying a person as a man or a woman. If we start thinking of each other as just people, it allows us to identify with each other in a way that has never really been possible before.”
If the point of this kind of identity transition is to reconcile the way the world sees you with the way you see yourself, the details of perception and representation become crucial. “A really interesting thought exercise is to say ‘they’ and ‘them’ for all genders,” Soloway instructed me. I was confused, so she explained. “If you said, ‘I have to go pick up my friend at the airport,’ I could very easily say, ‘What time do they get here?’ So there is a structure for talking about your friend and not knowing their gender—and it’s perfect English.”
I pointed out that strict grammar forbids using a plural pronoun for a single person; it would sound crazy, for instance, to describe Soloway by saying, “They are my favorite director.”
Soloway shook her head vigorously. “All of the magazines and newspapers need to begin to do this,” she said. “The language is evolving daily—even gender reassignment, people are now calling it gender confirmation!” She was getting excited. “The promise of this revolution is not having to say, ‘Men do this, women do this.’ ”
In the utopia that Soloway envisions, I suggested, there would be no need to transition, because there would be no gender in the first place. Soloway parsed it differently: “In a few years, we’re going to look back and say, ‘When we were little, we used to think that all women had vaginas and all men had penises, but now, of course, we know that’s not true.’ ”
One afternoon, near Soloway’s house, we saw a very fit woman with a green streak in her hair, walking a big dog. “Oh, my God, it’s Raelle Tucker!” Soloway said, and the two embraced.
Tucker explained that they had met twenty years ago, when Soloway saw her in a play and then phoned to praise her work and ask, “Would you come and pose naked, crucified on a Star of David, in some dude’s back yard in North Hollywood?”
“We called it ‘Jewcified,’ ” Soloway explained. “It was for a show.”
“And then, because I was twenty-two and a stripper at the time,” Tucker continued, “and I had no clue how anything worked, Jill’s, like, ‘What can I do to pay you back?’ I said, ‘Can you get me an agent?’ And it took her years, but she did.”
Tucker, who was a writer on “True Blood,” said that she had just finished a pilot. “It’s a female ‘The Player.’ You know, the Tim Robbins movie? It’s about a female head of a studio who does a terrible thing and tries to cover it up.”
“I love it,” Soloway said, her eyes wide and bright. “I want to read it.”
They agreed that Tucker would send over her pilot script, and then she and her dog walked up the hill. Soloway was excited. “See, this is why Steven Spielberg is working with George Lucas is working with Lawrence Kasdan—there’s no mystery!” she said. “When you’re creating art, you want to work with people who are like you. You are creating propaganda for you.”
The writers Soloway assembled for “Transparent”—three men and four women, including Faith—are her playmates and her propaganda squad. Only one of them, Bridget Bedard, had experience in television before joining the show, as a writer on “Mad Men.” Soloway culled the rest of her staff from academia, fiction, queer activism, film, and musical theatre. Ali Liebegott was working at a grocery co-op in San Francisco when she got an e-mail from Soloway asking if she’d ever considered writing for TV. They had met years earlier, at a queer writers’ retreat that Liebegott organized. “Jill told me, ‘It’s easy—I could teach you in a weekend,’ ” Liebegott said. A statuesque blond writer who goes by Our Lady J (and who used to accompany Lady Gaga on the piano) came in through Soloway’s “transfirmative action” program. Soloway wanted a “trans-feminine perspective,” but couldn’t find a television writer who had one. So she solicited essays from trans women and then gave half a dozen of them a weeklong tutorial. Bedard said that she’d never encountered this approach before: “I was teaching people from ground zero how television works”—from the mechanics of dividing up a story over a season to the role of the writer on set. “I actually think it’s much harder than Jill says, but I also appreciate her attitude, because it’s so inclusive. It’s not precious. Nobody came in here saying, ‘Oh, we can’t do that.’ ”
On the day that I visited the writers’ room, Soloway was just back from New York, where she had screened new episodes for a test audience. She was wearing a silk T-shirt with a print of TV static and sitting on a beanbag, talking to the writers, who were gathered in a circle eating bagels. Soloway told them that the response had been “amazing—you could just feel it.” But at the airport coming home, she said, things had spun out of control: “It was a fuck show.” As Soloway had sat down in the back of a black S.U.V. sent to pick her up, she saw that her driver couldn’t get in, because another car had parked too close to his door. The driver of the other car, an Asian man, was smoking a cigarette, and he refused to move until he finished. “In thirty seconds, I went emotionally from O.K., they’re working it out, to I want to murder him,” Soloway said. She decided to crawl up to the front seat and back the car up herself, but, as she was negotiating the armrest, the smoking driver stood directly behind her S.U.V.
“Who is this guy, this future husband of mine?” Ali Liebegott—who is a butch lesbian—said. The other writers laughed. Like the show itself, the writers’ room is a place where intimacy prevails. People kid about the subject matter—there is a local dialect of invented words like “mussy,” a mashup of “man pussy”—but they take identity politics extremely seriously.
Soloway said that, even through her rage, “I could feel the sadness of this guy just trying to get some power.” Her driver then tried to push the smoker out of the way. “There was so much white privilege, male privilege, in his reaction.”
“Also the inherent sexism,” Micah Fitzerman-Blue, a slim young man blessed with, as he put it, “generic Semitic good looks,” added. “The driver feels justified in anything because you’re a woman and he has to protect you.”
The police were called. “I was thinking about how easily someone could have ended up in jail,” Soloway said. “We start to understand how masculinity and testosterone can become . . . horrible.”
Everyone agreed that some version of the incident might fit a road trip that they were working on for Josh, the middle child, who has the right personality to get embroiled in a flash fight: jittery rage and a wild sense of entitlement. Josh is “Transparent” ’s roving male id, and—like many of the characters—he can be deeply off-putting in his narcissism. But part of the show’s appeal is that it marries the marginalized idea of gender transition to the familiar American concept of reinvention. The characters keep stumbling into small opportunities for redemption.
The next day, the writers trudged down a hibiscus-lined path from their offices to a screening room, where they sat with friends and colleagues to watch the final episodes of the second season. By the end, Josh is sobbing in the arms of a man who has suggested that he needs to grieve for his father—“Maura is not Mort,” he is told—and many of the people in the audience were crying, too. Soloway seemed unsettled by the emotional response. As she walked out of the room, she shook her head and said, “God, it hits you right in the mussy.”
Fitzerman-Blue, walking next to her, agreed: “It gets you in the solar plussy.”
The writers determined that, in the second season, Ali Pfefferman would go to graduate school for gender studies, and that she would have an affair with a magnetic and much older female professor. They decided to model the character on the iconic lesbian poet Eileen Myles—a protégé of Allen Ginsberg’s who wrote the cult classic “Chelsea Girls,” along with eighteen other books. “So I go on sort of a deep dive of who Eileen is, watching videos of her,” Soloway told me. She felt the spiky blossoming of a crush. “I kind of get a feeling of, like, Oh, this is gonna be bad.”
Soloway and her husband were in an amorphous process of separating, which is ongoing. He is the music supervisor for “Transparent,” and he has a key to Soloway’s house, where he keeps his drum set. “We are dissolving some particular aspects of our connection,” Soloway said. “But we’ll always do the Jewish holidays together.”
By chance, soon after Soloway began her research, she was on a panel with Myles in San Francisco. “We had pretty much an instant connection,” Soloway said. At first, though, her schedule presented obstacles. “We tried very hard to get on the phone after we met in San Francisco,” Myles told me. “And, when we finally did, she goes, ‘I may have to get off in a minute to talk to Caitlyn Jenner.’ ”
When Soloway returned to the set, she found that her writers had bought Myles’s journal through a fund-raiser for a nonprofit, to help them work on character development. “I open it up, and the first thing it says is ‘Whoever falls in love with me is in trouble,’ ” Soloway said. “It was like she wrote to me without even knowing that I existed.”
In October, Myles and Soloway sat next to each other at a benefit in New York for the Feminist Press, as the city’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, accepted an award onstage. They were tight in the grip of new love; they touched each other’s backs and legs ceaselessly through the ceremony. Myles was wearing jeans and a button-down shirt, her hair silver and shaggy, her face set in a more lined version of the intense stare that Robert Mapplethorpe captured when he photographed her in 1980.
The next “Feminist Power Award” was given to Aydian Dowling, a muscular transgender man who had started a YouTube channel called Beefheads Fitness and who had been voted Men’s Health’s “Ultimate Guy.” He wore a suit and tie and motioned toward his table to acknowledge “my beautiful wife.”
“Isn’t that interesting?” Myles said. “ ‘My lovely wife . . .’ ” She let the thought trail off.
We spoke about it later, and Myles remembered “recoiling, because that traditionalist take on gender—which I’ve heard from trans women as well as trans men—it’s like permission to be the person we’ve been running from our whole lives.” What excited her about the movement was its potential to reinvent gender altogether. “I grew up thinking I was a boy and praying to God I’d become male,” Myles told me. “Jill says, ‘Why don’t you identify as trans?’ It’s like, I don’t want to make it your business to call me ‘he.’ I’m happy complicating what being a woman, a dyke, is. I’m the gender of Eileen.”
When we talked, Myles was in Washington, D.C., with Soloway, who had been invited to the White House, to honor the Transgender Day of Remembrance for victims of hate crimes. “And Jill’s moppa is here!” Myles said. “I just met him last night and that was great. He’s British . . . she’s British . . . they’re British.” (Carrie isn’t particular about nomenclature. “You go into a cab as ‘sir,’ and you come out as ‘ma’am,’ ” she told me. “You can’t train people; they’re going to say what they see.”) I asked Myles if, as a poet, she struggled to refer to an individual person as “they.” She said, “It’s not intuitive at all. But I’m obsessed with that part in the Bible when Jesus is given the opportunity to cure a person possessed by demons, and Jesus says, ‘What is your name?’ And the person replies, ‘My name is legion.’ Whatever is not normative is many.” She liked the idea of a person containing more than one self, more than one gender.
“Part of it is just the fiction of being alive,” she said. “Every step, you’re making up who you are.” ♦