It’s a Saturday night in midsummer at Los Angeles’s Club Shine, one of the city’s best parties by and for transgender women. The party is held at Oxwood Inn, a seedy bar in an unassuming suburb 25 minutes outside of L.A.; it draws droves of trans women and their admirers every week. Tonight, Hollywood’s trans starlets from Amazon Studios' Transparent, a group of women in their early thirties, have gathered to party with their sisters. Zackary Drucker arrives in blue jeans, high-heeled boots, and a smoky eye. Together with her fellow co-producer Rhys Ernst, Drucker handles everything on Transparent from nitty-gritty feedback on scripts to recruiting transgender actors, writers, and crew.
Now, Drucker cuts through the fog machine’s exhaust toward her friend and colleague Van Barnes, the personal assistant to Transparent’s lead actor Jeffrey Tambor. Barnes is wearing a bright chartreuse skirt cinched at the waist. She and Drucker kiss each other’s cheeks. They’ve been friends for more than a decade and now find themselves employed together in Hollywood. Trace Lysette, an actress on Transparent, emerges between the parted smoke. She has been perched by the bar, her hair slicked into a high bun, gold hoop earrings bouncing against her neck, and now springs from her seat toward the dance floor, moving her hips to the music.
On the show, Lysette portrays a trans woman named Shea. Though she’d been in the film industry for years before Transparent, it never before felt safe to disclose her gender. After twirling once or twice beneath a disco ball, she steals away from the crowd, shifting through more smoke and tightly packed partygoers, then slips out a back door into the parking lot. Resting upon a silver guardrail, she tells me that Transparent is different than any other production she’s worked on. “There is an underlying sense of home."
Alexandra Billings and Trace Lysette
Jennifer Clasen / Amazon Studios for BuzzFeed News
Since she began working on Transparent, Lysette’s career has flourished. She was in an NBC pilot, Curse of the Fuentes Women, and performed alongside legend Sir Patrick Stewart in Blunt Talk, the new Starz series by Jonathan Ames. “We’re on a new frontier,” she says. “Space is being created for us. It’s important we step up and take those opportunities so that the generation that comes behind us will have even more than we did.”
When Lysette talks about space, she doesn’t just mean room at the party: She’s talking about both the cultural movement for transgender equality and the structural integration of transgender talent and staff throughout the production chain of Transparent. From creator Jill Soloway, Transparent follows the transgender patriarch turned matriarch of an upper-middle-class Jewish family, Jeffrey Tambor’s Maura Pfefferman, as she comes into womanhood amid the intersecting storylines of her unhinged adult children. The Amazon Studios series debuted in the fall of 2014 to instant critical acclaim, winning two Golden Globe Awards the following January and five Emmys this past September. While the entirety of Season 2 debuts on Dec. 11, the first episode, which follows Maura’s family during her daughter Sarah’s wedding, began streaming for Amazon Prime users on Nov. 30. TV fanatics and transgender activists alike are eager to see how the rest of the second season will measure up in terms of transgender representation and, of course, quality storytelling. While mainstream praise of the series abounds, Transparent has not escaped controversy, especially within the transgender community: Many feel the lead role should have been given to someone who is themselves transgender.
Previously, there have been few major accomplishments in mainstream media for transgender representation. Candis Cayne made television history in 2007 when she portrayed a trans woman in a recurring role on ABC’s Dirty Sexy Money. But it wasn’t until the summer of 2013 that the issue became relevant to film industry leaders, or the general public. When Laverne Cox first portrayed a trans character in the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black, her performance dovetailed with a greater cultural and political transgender movement.
Transparent has involved the creative contributions of trans people since its inception, but for the second season, Soloway has doubled down on her mission to employ trans people in every production department. She’s hired an unprecedented number of trans collaborators, including Silas Howard, who directs one of the episodes; a full-time writer, Our Lady J; and model, actress, and It girl Hari Nef.
What does it take to produce a major, multimillion dollar television show that centers on a marginalized, historically destitute population? And how important is it, really, to have members of that marginal community represented both in front of and behind the camera in productions that spotlight their storylines? The transgender community in the United States has a long history, one of survival and kinship within an inhospitable world. Trans people have come to understand their own obscurity within pop culture — for many of them, it’s beyond surreal to see trans life start emerging in the limelight.
Now, outside of the Oxwood, a woman entering the club holds the door for us, and Lysette and I dash through. We’re carried back to the dance floor. There are cisgender men waiting eagerly along the wall, hoping to pick up a beautiful transgender woman. But here, the men are secondary. Women reign supreme.
Zackary Drucker (center)
Jennifer Clasen / Amazon Studios for BuzzFeed News
I witness a similar inversion of power on a bright Monday morning when I arrive at the sunlit studios of Paramount Pictures.
It’s 8 a.m., and the front corridor of a tan, generic Paramount office building, where this morning’s shoot is taking place, has been commandeered by Soloway’s feminist enterprise. Some hundred men and women mill in and out. The production crew have already shot the first several episodes of Season 2; the episode they’re shooting now falls midway through the season. Cameras, lights, and wooden director’s chairs strapped with black canvas, their backs emblazoned with the show's title in orange lettering, dot the room. Jeffrey Tambor is standing near a row of monitors, talking to Silas Howard, Transparent’s first transgender director. (This is the first and only episode Howard has directed for the show; Season 1 was directed by Soloway and Canadian film director Nisha Ganatra.)
I envy the perfect periwinkle lacquer of Tambor’s pedicure. It works seamlessly with his wardrobe: that of an airy, confident, and comfortable Californian woman of a certain age. His long gray wig is held by a butterfly clip. Howard leans in to give him direction for the scene’s next take. As they huddle, a familiar voice sounds from my side. Barnes, Jeffrey Tambor’s assistant, is sitting in a nearby chair. She calls to me with one black headset strategically planted below her coiffed blonde hair, holding another in her hand. “Here, honey, put these on,” she says in her charming country drawl.
The camera follows Maura through the L.A. LGBT Center after she receives her first prescription of hormone replacement therapy. HRT is the medication she’ll take to change her sex from male to female. Hormones are a rite of passage for transgender people — they’re often the first step taken to transition. I’d had my own version of Maura’s moment myself, and I’ve seen countless tearful girlfriends clutch that same crinkling paper bag of pills.
Between takes, Drucker hurriedly breezes past on her way to a meeting. Barnes is seated behind the monitor to my right. Howard give actors feedback on their performances. Two trans crew members, Thomas and Zoe, help orchestrate behind the camera. Natasha London, a trans woman who works in wardrobe, is nearby and ready to assist. Four transgender extras populate the set. Outside of LGBT-centric environments, like a community center or health clinic, being trans can feel like an obstacle between you and the rest of the world. The Transparent Season 2 set feels like a trans separatist commune in the heart of Hollywood.
The trans presence at Paramount isn’t only evident on set. A diverse group of gender-nonconforming people are found both onscreen and off, including trans women, men, and nonbinary individuals. Nearly all of them say that the show has made a significant impact on their lives, including Rain Valdez, who is employed in accounting. Valdez has worked in postproduction for years, elevating through the ranks from assistant editor, to editor, to producer before starting account work for Transparent. Like Trace Lysette, before working on Soloway’s show Valdez wasn’t out about being transgender at work or in most of her personal life. “About a year ago I started thinking about my life and realizing that I never really looked back and appreciated what I went through,” she says. “To do all of that to just be in hiding, to be in secret, just didn’t make any sense.”
In order to break free of secrecy, she went to the L.A. LGBT Center, and began to attend their trans support group, Perceptions. In the fall of 2014, Transparent debuted. Valdez was familiar with the show long before she was approached to work on the second season. “There’s some scenes where [Tambor] is at the group, the transgender Perceptions group, and I was like — that’s my group! This is my life!"
“I started to realize that I’m kind of a success story,” she added. “There’s so many deaths, there’s so many threats, hate crimes, and abuse... I started to realize that, oh my gosh, I’ve been hiding all this time when in reality I could probably be helping people.”
Valdez began working for the Economic Empowerment Group at the L.A. LGBT Center in order to help other trans people find success in their transitions. Unemployment in the transgender community is an epidemic. A study from 2013 titled A Broken Bargain for Transgender Workers, put out by several organizations in conjunction with the Human Rights Campaign, reveals this inequity. Among other findings, the study shows that trans workers report unemployment at twice the rate of the general population, and are nearly four times as likely to make less than $10,000 a year. The study traces this disparity to several factors, including discrimination on the job and in the hiring process. Other obstacles further clarify the cause: Trans people experience difficulty changing legal identity documents, and health care exclusions are common, limiting their options.
When producers Drucker and Ernst contacted the Economic Empowerment Group at the center when they were hiring for Season 2, Valdez was thrilled. Transparent is the first place she’s worked where the person running the show is a woman. “I pinch myself every day,” she says.
Jennifer Clasen / Amazon Studios for BuzzFeed News
Tambor’s trailer is nestled in a small colony near the soundstage. It’s Monday afternoon and he is seated near a desk, his assistant close by. He’s no longer Maura, her periwinkle toes now hidden in thick leather loafers, the butterfly-clipped braid momentarily retired. “This is quite a moment in America,” Tambor says, referring to the contemporary transgender movement. “I certainly am a contender for the ‘luckiest actor in the room’ award.”
This past September, Tambor made history by becoming the first actor to receive an Emmy for a role portraying a transgender person. His was among five Emmys Transparent took home this year, out of 11 nominations. Clutching the golden-winged statue, he thanked the people he called his teachers, including trans producers and collaborators Ernst, Drucker, and Barnes. Earlier in his acting career, he had another teacher: someone who used to say, “When you act, you have to act as if your life depends on it." "And now,” he said, “I’ve been given the opportunity to act because people’s lives depend on it.”
According to Tambor, the role of Maura Pfefferman changed his life. She’s given him a sense of responsibility. Tambor cocks his head to the side. His eyes narrow, and he uncrosses his legs as he underscores the greatness of a truly human transgender character. “I like to say my politics are in my performance... I need to know that the human quotient is there at all times.”
The majority of trans characters are depicted as villains, sex workers, and victims. That is beginning to change in the 21st century, but most Americans, including Tambor, are being introduced to the humanity of the trans community for the very first time. Transgender people are tired of seeing their storylines interpreted by someone outside the fold, because transgender experiences have historically been perverted and sensationalized by gawking outsiders, while the real people those storylines are based on remain oppressed and marginalized.
“What I love about this year is that we’re sort of taking the Bubble Wrap off of her, Saint Maura,” Tambor says of his character’s development in Season 2. The writers have explored her fallibility. Maura isn’t idyllic. She is meant to be a person, with normal needs and flaws. In the season premiere, Maura has taken on a new confidence. In the beginning of the episode at her daughter’s wedding, when standing for a family portrait, the photographer misgenders her, saying, “Chin up, sir” — and, clearly having had enough, Maura marches proudly away from the shoot. In another moment, during an uncomfortable confrontation with an estranged sister who cannot stomach her sibling’s true identity, Maura quickly pivots from an icy conversation to privately choking up at the intolerance she faces even inside her own family. She’s subject to error and anger. “I love that,” Tambor says.
Trace Lysette (center) and Alexandra Billings (right)
Jennifer Clasen / Amazon Studios for BuzzFeed News
He particularly loves that the general audience of Transparent — the cisgender American viewer — can watch Maura and say, “I’m like that,” when they see her short temper, her desires, and her fears.
The second season will also be exploring other complex trans storylines. Hari Nef, who landed a contract at the major modeling agency IMG this past spring, makes an elusive appearance in the season premiere, which intercuts the Pfefferman present-day Jewish wedding with flashbacks to a party in 1930s Berlin, where hundreds of colorful, gender-nonconforming queers dance together with Nef in the center. Here, Transparent stays true to a tradition of ambitiously tackling uncharted chapters of the past century. Season 1 follows Maura to a 1980s cross-dresser retreat, rarely represented in pop culture, while Season 2 has leaped decades back in time and half a world away to portray the exploration of sexual and gender identity in Europe before World War II. The modern-day wedding and 1930s party run parallel until they merge when Nef’s character appears in the final scene, as a figment on a patio chair outside the hotel where the Pfefferman wedding occurred.
Jill Soloway (right) and Hari Nef (second from right)
Jennifer Clasen / Amazon Studios for BuzzFeed News
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