Though Drucker and Ernst are no longer a couple, they chose to publish these photographs anyway, because even as transgender stories are becoming more mainstream, there are few public examples of trans people leading ordinary lives, filled with love and lazy mornings. There are even fewer cases, as Drucker and Ernst emphasized that night in July, of trans people taking control over how they are represented.

On “Transparent,” whose third season begins this month, their goal has been to ensure not just that trans people are depicted accurately on screen, but also that they are working behind the scenes — as writers, directors and personal assistants. Except for the character of Maura, a father who comes out to his family as trans, played by Jeffrey Tambor, every trans role on the show is filled by a trans person. The desire to see more transgender people in front of and behind the camera also informs much of Drucker’s and Ernst’s work as artists. Drucker is often the star of her own experimental videos and performances, which challenge conventional views of sex and gender. Her work has been shown at MoMA’s PS1, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and SFMoMA. Ernst’s narrative filmmaking tends to feature trans actors and documentary subjects and travel the film-­festival circuit. He is at work on his first full-length feature, which he describes as a “middle-­aged trans-guy buddy-­movie comedy.”

“I remember when we were installing the photographs at the Whitney, someone asked us: ‘Oh, this is great. Who was the photographer?’ ” Ernst told the bookstore crowd. “They assumed we were just the subjects, which is of course the history of this kind of work. But this is what I hope changes going forward. It’s the work we’re doing in television. It’s the work we’re doing in filmmaking. It’s the work we’re doing in photography. It’s making trans people the author, rather than just the subject. That’s really the key.”

Pop-­cultural representations of trans people have historically reduced them to objects of pity or scorn. “Over and over again, somebody is crying in the mirror, taking off their wig,” Ernst said over dinner at a gastropub near the Silver Lake home he shares with his partner, Patrick Staff, an artist. “There are these fixations that cis-­gender people get that are not the way our lives are being lived at all.” (To be “cis-­gender” is to identify as the gender you are assigned at birth; i.e., not trans.) A prime example, he said, is “Dallas Buyers Club,” a critically acclaimed film that earned Jared Leto an Oscar in 2014 for his supporting role as Rayon, an H.I.V.-­positive trans woman. “She was a throwaway character,” Ernst griped, “a drug addict who was there to make the protagonist learn about himself, and she was named after a synthetic fabric. That’s not a real person.”