Actress Hari Nef wants to see complex, even difficult, trans characters on TV

"Transparent" tackles issues and ideas that have never been tackled before on American television: In the show, the family's patriarch becomes its matriarch.

Although it's not actually on TV, the Amazon Studios show has won a number of Emmys — and has more nominations — thanks in large part to its outstanding cast of supporting actors. Among them is Hari Nef, who, in real life, became something of a celebrity on Tumblr, where she chronicled her day-to-day experiences transitioning from male to female.

Nef transitioned mostly during the time she was studying drama at Columbia University. Her Tumblr blog quickly became a public forum for other people going through a similar experience.

“When people were liking, commenting, re-blogging, saying, ‘Oh my God, me, too,’ that was my way of getting by,” Nef says. “They look at the world around them, they look at the internet, they look at the representations that are available and they do not see themselves. They have no reason to believe that all of these private things that they're going through happen to other people, and they feel crazy and they feel alone. That’s why the trans suicide rate for youth is so high.”

Despite the challenges of transitioning, Nef acknowledges her current good fortune. Transparent was her first job out of college. “It’s not like I worked my way to the top,” she laughs.

Nef may have had thousands of followers on Tumblr, but it was a real-world connection that got her the gig on Transparent. When she was younger, she had a music teacher at summer camp named Faith Soloway, who happens to be the sister of Transparent creator Jill Soloway.

“Faith is now a writer on the show and she kept in touch with me on Facebook, and she was like, ‘Hey, Jill, keep an eye on this girl. I used to know her from camp and now she's in New York doing stuff,’” Nef says. “And Jill kept an eye on me, I guess.”

Nef didn’t even need to audition. Soloway wrote the part for her after meeting her. The part Soloway wrote for Nef was Tanta Gittlel, an ancestor of the show's present-day Pfefferman family who lived as a cross-dresser in Berlin in the 1920s.

“It was so fascinating to imagine the mindset of this trans girl, this gender-nonconforming girl — they didn't even have the language for it back then, which made it even more free,” Nef says. “In a way, that was so liberating for her. She was completely fearless. She was living life on her own terms and she had no reason to believe that there was this impending doom, because she was in Berlin and everything was legal.”

Nef says she can’t really assess the impact of Transparent. Conceptually, she says, it works to change the public consciousness, because it humanizes a trans experience. She has some reservations, however.

“I am just scared that the representations of trans people, if we continue to think in this way, are going to become one-dimensional,” she says. “You're not going to be able to portray a complicated trans person. It has to be a squeaky clean, just like you and me, 100 percent sympathetic character. No gray area. Like, ‘Look at this amazing trans person, look at this heroic trans person, look at this brave trans person.’ I'm bored with that.”

Jeffrey Tambor’s trans character, Maura, is mostly not boring, Nef concedes. Maura is a flawed human being and a questionable parent. But, Nef says, for every moment we question Maura, there’s another moment “with sweet or sympathetic piano music where we're supposed to feel bad for her or relate to her.”

“This is not a critique of Transparent,” Nef insists. “This is acknowledging in a very realistic, clear-eyed way, I hope, the space Transparent occupies as the first major TV show to tackle any of this stuff. It's ‘square one.’ Jill Soloway would be the first to agree with me.”

Through “brute force and self-promotion,” Nef has found other ways to transcend the dangers of typecasting. She recently became the first transgender model to be represented by the super-elite agency, IMG.

Nef’s first high-fashion job was walking the Gucci show in Milan. She was the first trans model that company had ever worked with.

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen.