Jill Soloway Based Emmy-Nominated 'Transparent' on Real Life

Like the characters in her TV series "Transparent," which is nominated at this Sunday's Emmys, Jill Soloway understands the challenges of having a transgender parent: She based the show on personal experiences.

"I think back about three years ago when my parents came out to me, and the rush of feelings that come with that," Soloway said in a recent interview. "And for me, this kind of odd feeling that I knew I was going to be making a television show about it, but a very scary feeling of how will the world accept all of this?"

This was before Bruce Jenner's public transformation into Caitlyn; before "Orange Is the New Black" made Laverne Cox a household name.

"What a crazy, amazing, zeitgeist moment of a world-shift change; a sea change that we never could have imagined we would be part of," Soloway said. "It's flabbergasting. I'm flabbergasted."

Her hope when she created the show, she said, was to "make it safer for my parent to walk out of her apartment building; make it safer for her to hail a taxi cab or safer for her to stand in the elevator with people who she's never met."

"I was really thinking about a personal love letter to my parents to try and shift the world ever so slightly," Soloway said. "And it's really shifted the world in a big way, and I'm astonished."