Hir's associate artist, casting agent Lucky Price, is a transgender man. Credit:Louie Douvis Hir, which premiered on Broadway in 2015 and is also playing through July at the Bush Theatre in London, is a fearless, darkly funny and poignant work about a dysfunctional family in transition. The playwright, American Taylor Mac, insists that the role of Max be played by a transgender actor. The word "hir" is a third-person singular, gender-neutral pronoun. Pimblett prefers to be referred to as "they", "their" and "them", or "he", "his" and "him". He believes it is vital for transgender people to play transgender roles on stage and screen. "If cis-gender [those whose gender identity matches the sex assigned at birth] men are always playing trans women, or if cis women are always playing trans men, the general public gets this idea that trans people really are the gender of the actor that's playing them. "That can have some violent and deadly ramifications for trans people in general life. Also, I honestly think it doesn't make for good art. I don't think it makes for a good performance. I think it involves a lot of extra work on behalf of the cis-gender actor. Often, because of that, their performance comes off as hollow and trite and not a real person. They are often just playing a caricature."

"I had a pretty OK girlhood ... But then, when I was 18, I didn't feel like moving towards womanhood." Kurt Pimblett Credit:Louie Douvis Pimblett came out as transgender at 19. He had a happy childhood. His mum and dad – both feminists – raised Pimblett to believe that girls could do and be anything. But, as a teenager, he felt "a general sense of unease and discomfort" about his body. "I was always very uncomfortable ... It was a sense of not having ownership over my body and not knowing how to move it in the right way. "I had a pretty OK girlhood. A lot of trans people maintain, 'Oh I was never a girl', but there was definitely a part of me that could identify with that. But then, when I was 18, I didn't feel like moving towards womanhood. It wasn't something I wanted to be doing at all. I wasn't a kid any more, I wasn't a girl. I was like, what's the alternative? I'm not a woman. That was the turning point, when I realised what my future and what me as an adult or a young person was going to look like." Pimblett was not always called Kurt and prefers not to reveal the name he was given at birth. "I feel like it's a reasonable assumption that trans people aren't using their birth names. I also think a good rule of thumb is, would I say this about a cis-gender actor? Plenty of actors use names other than their birth names and people don't point it out."

I was always very uncomfortable ... It was a sense of not having ownership over my body and not knowing how to move it in the right way. Kurt Pimblett He was studying at the University of Wollongong when he came out, working towards a bachelor of creative arts. In that progressive environment he "received no resistance" from friends or peers. "I've been very fortunate in general, but in particular the year I came out was 2014, the same year the Laverne Cox cover of Time magazine was published with the cover-line, 'The Transgender Tipping Point'. I came out into a world where this was on people's minds. I can hardly imagine how tough it must have been to come out 10 years earlier – or before that. It's been handy to have a point of reference, to be able to point at it and say, 'This is what I'm talking about. This is another person like me.' "Honestly, I think the rate of change and the rate of progression [of understanding about trans issues] is startling." One of the first people Pimblett told was his younger sister, Rose. She was 12. "She was like, 'OK, cool, that's great'. And she never had any problems with pronouns or any of that. My parents, it took a very long time for them to understand [the decision]. My mother did start to blame herself.

"[As a feminist], it was a worry of hers. 'Do you not think being a woman is good enough?' or 'Have I not been a good enough female role model?' But no, it wasn't anything to do with that. In terms of the way I was raised, womanhood was not a narrow thing. It was just a thing that wasn't me." Looking back, Pimblett sympathises with his parents. At the time, he says, he dealt with the situation like the impatient teenager he was: "It was, 'This is the truth, this is my world, you need to understand it immediately or otherwise you're an awful person.' "I started with the complicated information real quick. I'm still telling them stuff – they're at an OK spot right now, things are OK – but I have simplified my narrative and what I tell them a lot over the years." In April last year, after many years of consideration, Pimblett had surgery. His breasts were removed and his chest reconstructed to look classically male. In the month before the surgery, he stopped reading about trans issues in the media. "I didn't want to know about how anybody else's surgery had turned out," he says. "Because your body is always going to look like your body. It's never going to look like anybody else's. Trying to look like somebody else is only going to do you emotional and mental harm. All you can do is prepare yourself for the outcome. And I did that. "My breasts never felt like they were part of my body," he says. "They always felt like something extraneous that shouldn't have been there in the first place.

"A couple of months or so after the surgery, when I was up and living a normal life, I remember I had this very specific moment. I was walking home from the shops and I realised I felt like I owned my body. I loved my body and I cared for my body and I wanted to exercise. I wanted to physically inhabit this self instead of just putting up with it." Acting is Pimblett's great love. He dropped out of university after becoming too busy with stage productions in Sydney. Over the past two years, he has appeared in shows with the Australian Theatre for Young People, Montague Basement and Left of Centre Theatre Company. An audition for trans artist Charles O'Grady's play Telescope in 2016 was a particular turning point, sparking a greater involvement in Sydney's theatre scene. But it hasn't always been an easy journey. "Frequently roles I get involve me playing a transgender role, [with] that character's gender being questioned," Pimblett says. "And there's always a line like, 'Are you a boy or a girl?' etcetera, etcetera. I was at a point in one show where that got to me ... It just gets hard to go up on stage night after night in front of a room full of people because when I say the words, 'I'm not a girl, I'm a boy', the audience immediately looks at my body, looks at the way my voice sounds, begins to not just see the character but also to see me. "They're not just listening to the words the character is saying ... They start to question me as a person. It's a very personal and at times painful thing to have happen, over and over." Hir, directed at Belvoir by Anthea Williams, follows a family of four, all of them in a transition of some sort. There is Paige, played by Helen Thomson, discovering freedom and feminism after years of abusive treatment from her husband, Arnold. Arnold is played by Greg Stone, father of transgender advocate Georgie Stone. His character has had a stroke. Paige, in her vengeance, force-feeds him oestrogen with his medication. She also dresses him in drag – rainbow wigs and ladies nighties – and paints his face in clownish make-up.

Into this scene, a home strewn with clothes and piled with mess, comes eldest son Isaac, played by Michael Whalley, dishonourably discharged after three years in combat in Afghanistan. All at once, he discovers his father's condition, his mother's metamorphosis and that his younger sibling Maxine is now a teenager called Max. Hir's focus on a dysfunctional family in uproar in middle America makes it part of a long-running style of theatre, a genre the New York Times dubs "angst-amidst-the-chintz". But it is also a bristling black comedy, a no-holds-barred, self-aware satire that rips through modern America's flaws. For the playwright Mac, Hir is not about gender. Instead, it uses transgender issues as a metaphor for growth and change. As Pimblett says, the character Isaac is seeking the familiarity and safety of home. "I think once you've had that period of radical growth you do want something normal again. Something that feels safe again. One of Max's throughlines as a character is that all this wild shit doesn't need to happen in order for Max to exist as a person. That gender isn't really you. "What Max is doing isn't really that ground-breaking or radical ... It's mainly the reaction of cis people that make it seem that way."

The production's associate artist, casting agent Lucky Price, is a transgender man. He has thought carefully about the way transgender issues are represented in culture and the media. "If people just get to know trans people's stories, then there's really nothing to feel threatened or frightened about," he says. "People are just scared of the unknown. They feel threatened, maybe about their own idea of what normal is, and confused about how it might affect them. "The reality, when you start to answer those questions, is that it doesn't really affect those people. It doesn't affect anyone at all other than the people who are going through this experience directly. Being open-minded benefits everyone." Price says anyone who feels confused about transgender issues, including the correct use of gender pronouns, should first focus on being mindful and respectful. "Ask the person how they would like to be addressed," he says. "No one will ever be offended by that. "I have a basic rule of three. I always assume someone is going to get it wrong to start with. The first time we can have a laugh about it. Second time I'd probably correct you, and we probably wouldn't laugh about it but it would still be light. The third time, you need to pull your socks up.