Illustration by Stanley Chow

In a scene from “Transparent,” the television series created by Jill Soloway, a women’s-studies professor stands before a room of listless undergraduates, haranguing them in the accusatory tone favored by a certain strain of academic. “Because women bled without dying, men were frightened!” the professor—played by Soloway, wearing a tent of a top and a pink dreadlock in her bun—says. “The masculine insists to cut things up with exclamation points—which are in and of themselves small rapes, the way an exclamation point might end a sentence and say, ‘Stop talking, woman!’ ”

At the back of the classroom, Syd, played by Carrie Brownstein, turns to her friend Ali Pfefferman (Gaby Hoffman) and asks, “Have you ever been raped by an exclamation point?”

“Actually, once I was gang-raped: question mark, exclamation point, and semicolon,” Ali replies.

“That’s brutal,” Syd says stonily. “It’s very underreported.”

In person, Jill Soloway looks nothing like a dowdy professor. She looks more like a wide-eyed cartoon doe. Her resting facial expression is curious, attentive, intent. She has a delicate frame, brown hair that falls to her jaw, and big brown eyes. Several of her friends describe her as “a doer.” Amazon, “Transparent” ’s producer and distributor, has a series of governing principles; Soloway’s favorite is “bias for action.” She didn’t want to sit around talking when I visited her, in Los Angeles, on a warm afternoon in late October. It was a month after she won the Emmy for best director, and her star, Jeffrey Tambor, won another one, for his portrayal of Maura Pfefferman, a transgender woman who has come out at the age of sixty-eight. Soloway wanted to walk up and down the hills of Silver Lake, the hip, idyllic neighborhood where she lives, and which provides the setting for much of her show.

Sometimes, though, Soloway sounds not entirely unlike that women’s-studies professor she played. “A patriarchal society can’t really handle that there’s such a thing as a vagina,” she said. “The untrustworthy vagina that is discerning-receiving.” Soloway, who recently turned fifty, was wearing leggings and blue nail polish and a baseball cap that said “Mister.” She sped past a stretch of Craftsmen bungalows, whose front yards were studded with bicycles, jade plants, and toys. “So you can want sex, you can want to be entered, and then a minute later you can say, ‘Stop—changed my mind,’ ” she continued. “That is something that our society refuses to allow for. You don’t feel like it now? You’re shit out of luck. You know why? Because you have a pussy! To me, that is what’s underneath all this gender trouble: most of our laws are being formed by people with penises.”

Most of our entertainment, of course, has also been formed by people with penises, and Soloway is trying to change that: through her hiring practices, her choice of subject matter, and the way she thinks and acts at work. “We’re taught that the camera is male,” she said, turning to walk uphill, backward, to tone a different part of her legs. “But I’m not forcing everybody to fulfill something in my head and ‘Get it right—now get it more right.’ ” Directing with “the female gaze,” she asserted, is about creating the conditions for inspiration to flourish, and then “discerning-receiving.”

On set, Soloway thinks of her job as akin to being a good mom: “Kids come home from school, want to put on a play in the back yard. You help them build a stage; you make sure they take breaks, have a snack.” (Soloway has two sons, Isaac, nineteen, and Felix, seven.) Jeffrey Tambor told me, “I have never experienced such freedom as an actor before in my life. Often, an actor will walk on a set and do the correct take, the expected take. Then sometimes the director will say, O.K., do one for yourself. That last take, that’s our starting point.”

The cast talks about “Transparent” as a “wonderful cult,” but Soloway disputes this. “It’s not a cult,” she says. “It’s feminism.” Women, Soloway said, are naturally suited to being directors: “We all know how to do it. We fucking grew up doing it! It’s dolls. How did men make us think we weren’t good at this? It’s dolls and feelings. And women are fighting to become directors? What the fuck happened?”

Soloway describes herself as “seditious.” Her production company is called Topple, as in “topple the patriarchy.” Ultimately, this trait has contributed to her success: while “Transparent” is, at its core, a family drama about California Jews who have a standing order at Canter’s Deli and who bicker about which of the siblings should inherit the house where they grew up, it is also a radical exploration of gender and sexuality, unlike anything that preceded it on television.

But for many years Soloway’s insurrectionary tendencies were a career obstacle. In 2011, after almost two decades as a television writer, Soloway was broke, with two kids, trying to recover from the recent writers’ strike and the recession. Then her old friend Jane Lynch, who was starring on “Glee,” told her about a job on the show, and Soloway went to meet with the producers. “Finally, here’s this moment where I’m meeting on ‘Glee,’ ” Soloway said. “Ryan Murphy wants to hire me. I’ve been best friends with Jane Lynch for about three decades—we’re sisters. It’s happening.” As Soloway drove home from the meeting, her agent called to say, “Pop the champagne—they loved you.” A week later, he called again: Murphy had heard that Soloway was “difficult,” and wasn’t going to give her the job. The agent said he’d send a check to tide her over.

That night, Soloway sat in the bathtub, while her husband, Bruce Gilbert, a music supervisor for film and television, brushed his teeth. She remembers telling him, “ ‘I don’t want to use the money to pay off our debt. I want to be a director, and I want to make a film with it and get into Sundance. I want to double down on me.’ And Bruce was, like, ‘O.K.’ ” Then, just as Soloway was making the leap to directing her own material, her father called one afternoon and came out as transgender.

When Jill and her sister, Faith, were young, their family moved to the South Side of Chicago. Their parents—Harry, a psychiatrist who grew up in London, and Elaine, who had worked as a teacher to put Harry through medical school—wanted to raise the girls in a diverse neighborhood. They chose South Commons, a development of brown brick town houses erected by urban planners to attract members of various income brackets and races. Elaine flourished: within a month, she’d become the editor of the community newsletter, and she later worked as a press officer for the mayor of Chicago. Harry grew increasingly melancholic and withdrawn. He “missed most of the conversation,” according to Jill, because he was always “listening to a Cubs game, with a skin-colored knob in his ear and beige cord down his shirt and into his pants pocket.” Faith told me, “We didn’t have a dad who was curious about us—but, then, I didn’t see too many fathers being too into their kids.”