The creator of Amazon series Transparent said she plans to train a female transgender writer to “change the show”.

Jill Soloway said at a New Yorker festival panel on Saturday that she has been unable to find a female transgender television writer, so she and Transparent’s writing staff will train one. “We’re actually going to be helping make trans women TV writers by teaching them how to write,” Soloway said.

Transparent revolves around Maura (played by Jeffrey Tambor), who comes out as transgender late in life, and her three adult children. Though the show is criticallylauded, Soloway said the show needs a transgender female writer for its second season.

Soloway and the other Transparent writers are accepting short stories from applicants. They will then whittle the group to five women and work with them on a sample script. The four women who are not chosen are set to walk away with a spec script that could be shopped around to other television shows and some useful industry connections.

“No matter what we did, we were always going to be otherising Maura in some way,” said Soloway. “And in the same way where I wouldn’t want a man to say, ‘I can have a writers’ room full of men and we can write women just fine,’ I can’t say that I can create a show about a trans woman and not have a trans woman writing for me.”

Soloway consulted transgender writers and artists while developing Transparent and told US News and World Report that she created a “trans-firmative action programme” on set to ensure trans people are working at different layers of the production. Still missing from production, however, is a transgender female writer. “It’s absolutely necessary, and it’s gonna change the show,” Soloway said.

A Glaad study showed that from 2002 to 2012, 54% of transgender characters were portrayed in a negative way. Offensive representation of trans people in characters or storylines was a widespread problem across every major broadcast network and seven cable networks in that period.

“Most people don’t have, or are at least not aware, of having interpersonal contact with transgender people,” Edward Schiappa, a comparative media studies professor at MIT, told the Guardian. “If they don’t, that means all of their opinions, beliefs and judgments are going to be based on the mass media.”

Schiappa has conducted several studies that show how television shows featuring gay characters decreased the amount of prejudice in audiences of such shows.

Schiappa said that it is “a little risky” to have one person at the writers’ table representing an entire group, but that bringing in a transgender writer will ultimately provide stories from real-life experiences. “If you have one representative, who in turn probably knows other transgender people, it increases the odds of a broader range of representation and that’s what you really want,” said Schiappa.

Some members of the trans community are critical of the show for hiring a male to play a transgender female. Ashley Love, a transsexual and intersex media advocate and journalist, said the decision to hire a transgender writer does not erase this issue of having actors play transgender people of the opposite gender, which she calls “Hollywood trans-face.”

“Soloway can hire transsexual and transgender people to serve the set coffee, paint the back drop, juggle, do lighting, serve as glorified extras, consult, or even be in her new writing program, but it still does not compensate for the problematic compromise she made to have a man play the ‘Maura’ character,” Love said in an email.

“Trans-face others, misgenders and humiliates the women in our community by portraying our womanhood as an unbelievable laughing circus instead of enrolling compassion and affirmation. Trans* professionals on her payroll may apologize for this mockery, but many in the community are disappointed by the whole ‘man in a dress’ stereotype.”

All 10 episodes of Transparent were released on 26 September. Amazon said the show has been the top-watched series on its instant video service ever since and announced last week that it had renewed the show for a second season. It is set to stream in 2015.