Her name was  Cindy Story and she was the most famous transgender person on this planet. Or, as far as SETI has yet been able to determine, any planet.

From the early nineties up until fairly recently, the world knew her as Sam Story, the front man and songwriter for the rock and roll band named — after, I assume, approximately zero seconds of thought — The Story. (Which obviously made coming up with album titles really easy: Story Time, Another Likely Story, Never Ending Story, etc.).

With his trademark feral growl, cliché but catchy lyrics and a preternatural ability to co-opt just enough of current musical trends to stay evergreen, The Story achieved tremendous success, every few years popping up like mushrooms on the Billboard charts, their international tours selling out stadiums.

Sam had a hyper-masculine persona. It was so extreme that, even before he came out, he felt to me almost like a parody or maybe a piece of feminist performance art, which I guess he kind of was. Sam raced cars, drove motorcycles, flew planes, shot guns, lifted weights, did parkour, bow-hunted, collected knives and swords, and would — as he said in his Rolling Stone interview — "fuck anything that moved."

Quintessential overcompensation.

His personal life, as you probably surmised, was a disaster. Even by rock and roll standards. He had a penchant for drugs, fighting, DUI's. According to TMZ he had killed someone in a car crash, but was never prosecuted. (When you're rich and famous, everyone is your enabler, including the justice system.) He married some of the world's hottest women and divorced them, too. He experienced ferocious mood swings and according to Us Weekly attempted suicide at least twice. Legend had it that when he met Kurt Cobain at the Grammys in 1996, Kurt said, "That dude's got problems!" Which probably isn't true because as a matter of record, Cobain didn't attend the 1996 American Music Awards because he hated award shows and, also, had been dead for two years.

Tammy and I had never been fans of The Story, but we weren't detractors, either. I'd describe our attitude as benign indifference; the same way we thought about the Foo Fighters or U2 or Van Halen. We didn't mind when one of their songs came on the radio, but we never bothered to actually buy their music, either.

A few years earlier, The Story announced that they were going on  hiatus. No explanation was given. (The last song they recorded, by the way — and this is absolutely true — was called I'm Sick Of Being A Man, I Wanna Be A Woman, which amazingly nobody in or out of the band thought anything of at the time. I have to admit, it made me feel a whole lot better about the clues I missed with Tammy. I mean, I was pretty oblivious, but this was basically a signed confession set to music.)

Anyway, most of the band members quietly pursued solo projects or joined other bands or were strapped to a rocket ship and shot into space — who cares? — while Sam mysteriously dropped out of the public eye. Initially, there was a lot of frenzied tabloid speculation about rehab, AIDS, an overdose. Only The Weekly World News got it right, but no one took them seriously because, well, it was The Weekly World News. (It seems that when you do enough articles like "World's Smartest Ape Goes To College" and "Dead Hubby's Ghost Haunts Toilet" you lose some credibility. Although it's still more factual than Breitbart.)

Eventually the rags, and everybody else, lost interest and and moved on. By the time Sam — now in his mid-thirties and called Cindy — was catapulted into the national consciousness again I had pretty much forgotten all about him. Her. The news media started buzzing about a BREAKING STORY (ha!) and then, for the next six months, it was all Cindy Story, all the time.

As always, America was deeply divided. There were those who thought Cindy was courageous, a role model, a symbol of hope to everyone struggling with LGBT issues. Others insisted that she was mentally ill, or a sexual deviant poisoning the minds of our youth. Still others believed that she was nothing more than a privileged white guy in drag, or was just a shameless opportunist, hoping to cash in, and given that her new solo album entitled (of course) Cinderella Story dropped a week after she came out publicly, that wasn't necessarily an irrational guess. And because of her mega-stardom, Cindy quickly emerged as the de facto spokesperson for the transgender issues, whether she liked it or not.

(She liked it. A lot.)

A quick digression: In 2000, Al Gore was running for President (spoiler alert: he lost and soon Florida is going to be underwater) and he nominated a Jewish person (Senator Joe Lieberman) as his Vice Presidential running mate, the first Jew in history to have that honor. As a Jew myself, I was verklempt. What an incredible moment for our people! But then I learned about Joe and the more I learned, the less I liked him (the reasons aren't particularly important). And what had initially started out as: Oh, yes, a Jew! quickly turned into Oh, no, this Jew!

Which is basically the same trajectory Tammy had while watching Cindy's media blitz. Excitement and pride turning to chagrin and embarrassment. That said, there was an obvious upside to this:  Cindy brought tremendous attention to a and marginalized and misunderstood community on a global scale.

But the downside was obvious as well: Cindy had no idea what she was talking about. I'm not disparaging her (yet) but Cindy had just come out and was new to all this. She was in the early stages of learning for herself what it means to be a trans woman; she was clearly in no position to be lecturing everybody else about it. It would be like opening up a gourmet restaurant with a chef who couldn't even make an omelette without starting a kitchen fire.

Tammy wouldn't have minded so much if Cindy had just stayed on point about acceptance,  compassion and understanding, all things she could and did speak movingly about — but she also held a lot of unfortunate and unrelated political views that she spouted at every opportunity, alienating potential allies and muddying her message of equality with her weird rants about chemtrails, fiat money, the deep state and cultural Marxism. (Coming out liberates you, but it doesn't necessarily make you smarter.)

It made Tammy kind of nuts. Every week, it seemed, she was ranting about the latest unforced error from Ms. Story and the cavalcade of scathing headlines and savage comments on Twitter that followed when she, for example, off-handedly started blathering about how the C.I.A. has developed a weather control machine.

"Why? Why? Why can't she just stick to the fucking topic without saying something bugfuck insane?" demanded Tammy. "I swear, if I ever meet her, I will punch her in the face."

It would be many months later, but Tammy would in fact meet her. And, anticlimactically, nobody punched anyone in the face.

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Meanwhile, Dr. Stephanie's "reset" had lasted a lot longer than any of us had anticipated. In fact, it outlasted Dr. Stephanie herself, whom we fired after Samantha totaled up our marital therapy expenses on Quicken. "Christ," I said when she showed me the sum. "It would've been cheaper to get divorced."

It would have been one thing if we had been making meaningful progress, but we weren't. With my career on the skids, money was tightening and we needed to cut back on some of the nonessentials. We figured that there was no reason to shell out two hundred bucks a week to spin our wheels in Dr. Stephanie's office when we could just as easily spin our wheels in the comfort of our own home, for free.

"Awesome sauce!" Dr. Stephanie said when we told her we were ending therapy. It was hard to know which was weirder: That she was so upbeat about getting fired, or that we had spent tens of thousands of dollars on a therapist who used expressions like Awesome sauce! "I'm jazzed I could help!"

Samantha and I exchanged a look and I voiced what we both were thinking."Er, how did you help exactly?"

Dr. Stephanie looked surprised and, for the first time, a little hurt as well. "We worked out your groovy living arrangement."

"And it was supposed to be temporary," Samantha complained. "But it's been well over a year and we're still completely stuck."

"Dudes!" Dr. Stephanie said pointedly. "Twice a week you come to my office and I ask you if you want to modify our arrangement. And twice a week you're all, No, bruh, let's keep it as it is." She was paraphrasing, obviously. "The only thing we changed," she said, consulting her notes, "was the... well, we don't have to go over that again."

She was referring to the nothing-below-the-waist rule, which was lifted at Samantha's behest  back when she was seeing Trevor, who taught her acting class. It wasn't, Samantha claimed, because she was planning to sleep with him, but she wanted to be able to say I don't want to have sex like a grown-up rather than My therapist won't let me have sex, like a crazy person. It was hard to argue with the logic. That said, I was pretty sure they did have sex at some point. Which reminded me that, with all that had been going on, I had completely forgotten to kick the shit out of Trevor.

"I don't think you're stuck," Dr. Stephanie said, "I think the arrangement is working."

Grudgingly, I had to agree that there was some truth to this. Samantha and I had found a rhythm that for the most part was working, with the kids, even with each other. We got along better — not great, but better — and we enjoyed each others' company more. Still, we could not help but feel like failures for not meeting expectations, but maybe the expectations were the problem.

"So that's it?" Samantha said. "We should just live in adjacent houses, dating other people forever?"

"It's not about forever, homegirl. If this is working now, let it work."

"And if it stops working?"

"Then you try something else."

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Cindy Story had worked tirelessly to promote transgender issues, and also to remove her size 13 custom-made Italian leather pumps from her mouth. (Her trans talking points had gotten a lot more polished, but she simply could not stop herself from wandering off script.) And one day she hit on the idea doing a television show about transgender people.

Of course, there already was a television show about transgender people called Transparent, but what Cindy had in mind was something a little different. She grasped that, while Transparent was a huge critical success, it had a boutique viewership mostly confined to the coasts. Cindy wanted something with more mainstream appeal, specifically a half-hour comedy, because to her it seemed like every depiction of transgender characters in TV and film was so depressing. This was a complaint Tammy had as well, that trans characters always wound up assaulted or murdered or suicidal or raped or homeless. And while transgender people do have contend with all that — the statistics are staggeringly grim —  Cindy wanted to show something else, namely the joy that can come from living your own truth.

She also believed, correctly, that sitcoms had the power to humanize and normalize people (Will & Grace is the quintessential example). And because Transparent had come under fire from a substantial portion of the transgender community for not having a single transgender writer on the show —  a lot of them were also upset that the lead role was played by a cis person; which, if you ask me, was a textbook example of the perfect being the enemy of the good — Cindy wanted to ensure that there be as many transgender people as possible involved in the production.

Oh, and for those of you not familiar with the current terminology, cis is short for cisgendender which is defined by Merriam-Webster's thusly: of, or relating to, or being a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex the person had or was identified as having at birth. In other words, the vast majority of us. I know the trans community has bigger transfish to fry, but I think we'd all appreciate it if they came up with a less horrible label for us than the nails-on-a-blackboard sound of cis.

Anyway, Cindy made it a high priority to find a transgender comedy show runner. And as luck would have it there was — and as far as I know, still is — only one and that was my writing partner Tammy Gilmore.

In theory, this was a slam dunk project and a welcome end to our career losing streak. But if there was one emergent theme from our show biz career it's that nothing goes according to plan. And this was no exception. For starters, Cindy was quite adamant that she only wanted to hire Tammy, not me. Which would obviously destroy our partnership, and our friendship with it.

It also, incidentally, probably made me the first person in the world to be discriminated against for not being transgender.

I'm a trailblazer, y'all!

Far more worrisome, though, was this: Cindy had contacted Tammy directly... and Tammy hadn't said one word about it to me. There was an existential threat to my career, to my livelihood, and I was completely in the dark.