“A lot of people that I’ve spoken to who’ve watched the show are really experiencing a sense of grief that was [buried] because of fear and shame,” she says, “because in the middle of the plague there was this chaos—you can’t have those emotions that are more vulnerable when it’s all about survival.”

“It’s not just that we don’t have a seat at the table. There is no table built for us!”

Until very recently such stories have mainly been in the hands of cis showrunners, and not everyone in the trans community is sanguine about Hollywood’s newfound infatuation. Many trans writers and performers are finding it as difficult as ever to get a foothold in the industry. “It’s not just that we don’t have a seat at the table,” says Billings. “There is no table built for us!” And it’s true that so far there’s been only one major TV series conceived by trans creators: Sense8, a Netflix show by Lana and Lilly Wachowski, who made the blockbuster Matrix movies before they transitioned.

Still, things may be starting to shift. Our Lady J is in the process of developing her own television projects, something inconceivable to her five years ago. “The fact that executives are bringing us into the room now, I think, is big progress,” she says. “I am creating, and I know that there are other people out there creating and really trying to make this happen.”

It’s been a long time coming. Trans-themed scripted series floated around Hollywood pre-Transparent, but nothing ever made it to the air. Six years before Transparent premiered, Murphy made a 2008 pilot for FX called Pretty/Handsome, about a trans gynecologist and family man, played by cis actor Joseph Fiennes. FX did not pick up the series. A year later, the novelist T Cooper sold a show based loosely on his life, written with wife Allison Glock-Cooper, to Showtime.

“It was a love story between a man and woman—and the guy just happened to be trans,” says Cooper, who went on to write for Blacklist and The Get Down. Showtime eventually passed on the series. “The couple’s relationship was the most relatable, ‘normal’ thing about the show,” Cooper says. “I just think that folks weren’t ready for that. I think they were ready for seeing the transition and seeing how badly the transition affected the family members of the person transitioning.”

Cooper got so frustrated with the lack of industry support for trans projects that he directed, shot, and produced Man Made. An award-winning feature-length documentary about the world’s first transgender bodybuilding competition, Man Made introduces viewers to trans men of varied racial and class backgrounds. Although he gets lots of calls now from producers eager to have trans writers attached to projects they’re developing, Cooper says the networks continue to shy away from trans-centric shows, even when they have a dream team of actors and writers attached. “I can’t tell you how many times we’ve heard, ‘Oh, we already have a trans show in development,’ ” Cooper says. “There’s room for only one, which is heartbreaking.”

Most trans writers I spoke to had heard variations on this rejection. Our Lady J worries that some executives in Hollywood still see hiring trans people as a way to check off diversity boxes so they don’t get in trouble with Twitter. “But it’s not about getting in trouble,” she says. “It’s about creating content for the audience that exists.”

Jill Soloway at home in Los Angeles. By Danielle Levitt/Observer/Ey/Redux. Pose’s Our Lady J. By Zach DeZon/Contour/Getty Images.

Transparent executive producer Andrea Sperling, who has deep roots in the LGBTQ+ indie film world, says it’s always been a struggle getting companies to underwrite queer content. “Even though the culture is now much more aware and interested in the trans community, it doesn’t always mean that the people holding the purse strings are going to back it,” she says. Those with the power to greenlight such deals, despite evidence to the contrary, still tend to think that the audience for such shows is limited to communities they portray. Transparent and Pose have both proven the potential for a broad viewership—and awards—with this subject matter, but Sperling says executives chase breakout hits à la Modern Family with the potential for long, lucrative runs.