To accomplish that, Soloway enacted a “transfirmative action program,” favoring the hiring of transgender candidates over nontransgender ones. It wasn’t just a corrective to the trans community’s high rates of unemployment. Soloway wanted to create a set on which inclusivity was more than a buzzword, a place where no one should ever feel that they are part of a majority — not even the majority, whoever that might be on a particular day. “I really want it so that there’s no moment, on the set, when trans people are being otherized by people in the crew because they don’t think there are any trans people listening.” As of this writing, 20 trans people had been hired in the cast and crew, and more than 60 had been employed as extras.

Soloway built her writers’ room to favor people who didn’t have too much TV experience. She didn’t want people who had to unlearn the traditional way that shows were run, which she describes as “militaristic” (filled with commands like “Shoot!” “Cut!” “Action!” she explained, plus all that yelling). She wanted to replace it with what she called “a more feminine approach” to direction. She hired a novelist she liked and met at a retreat (who had been working at a grocery store), and a few screenwriters too, including her former assistant. She hired her sister, Faith. She also hired two full-time transgender consultants to steer her away from any pitfalls.

In a golf cart on the way back to his trailer, Tambor — turning heads in a wig, dress, full makeup and manicure — said: “She’s an alchemist in that sense. I mean, this isn’t Woodstock. This is hard, hard work. You can see people are tired and things like that. But gosh, she allows us to — you feel safe.” He continued, “She’s the first director of note in my career who’s ever come up to me and said: ‘Hey, guys, slow it down. Take your time.’ ”

Nisha Ganatra, a consulting producer who directs the episodes that Soloway doesn’t, said, “She’s formed this feminist collective. We’re all empowered to have the same voice rather than this hierarchical system of ‘I am the show runner, what I say is the most important thing.’ ”

Soloway has managed with “Transparent,” which is part cutting-edge TV show and part gender-studies utopian experiment, to keep alive the questions that have preoccupied her for years: If we are living in a post-gender-binary world, what is all this talk about feminine and masculine styles? How can you be a good feminist and also love watching beauty pageants and “The Bachelor” and the “Real Housewives” franchise (which Soloway does very much)? If gender isn’t important — if it’s just a construct — why is it so important?

In college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she tried her hand at playing the ideal college student — “makeup, hair, cute clothes” and “dating horrible, gross dudes.” She even tried to pledge a sorority, but a poorly timed dermatologic event pre-empted this. One day she was taking a walk on the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison with some of the friends she’d made, still very much preoccupied with cuteness, when she saw a bunch of people — “like hippies, feminists, demonstrators, political kids, people who fought” — wading in the water, just having a good and un-self-conscious time. These, she realized, these were her people.