But they work in different styles — Kreimendahl’s is visceral, Kaufman’s meditative, Mr. Barbagallo’s impish. And they have markedly different feelings toward the professional theater and its attitudes toward transgender artists. Kaufman described it as “really, really, really not trans friendly right now.” Kreimendahl viewed it, despite the occasional pronoun and bathroom confusion, as a more welcoming place, “very willing to learn and grow, as I am growing into myself.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.  Can you tell me something about your recent plays?  JESS BARBAGALLO It’s structured like a collection of short stories. The activity circulates around this guy named Barry and a neighbor who lives in the same apartment complex. It’s pretty unwieldy.  MJ KAUFMAN Mine is about a transmasculine person. His family thinks of him as Angela. But to himself and to his friends, he’s mostly Archer. I won’t spoil it, but yes, he has to negotiate these two different gender spaces and also a family transition.  BASIL KREIMENDAHL “Orange Julius” is about the relationship between a transmasculine child and their father. I knew I wanted to write about Agent Orange and the stories of children of Vietnam vets, about how Vietnam affects them.  When did you become interested in playwriting?  BARBAGALLO I’ve been writing since I was in high school. I was surprised to get into a conservatory acting program. I didn’t think I was a very good actor. Scene study did leave me a little cold. I graduated from school and then after I was out for a year, I was like, I can’t handle my student loans. I’m going to go back to college to become a teacher and I’ll study playwriting.  KREIMENDAHL Like Jess, I always wrote growing up. I wanted to write films. My family, we never went to the theater. I was at a community college in Florida and I took a theater class and a film class. In film class, we just talked about directors. In the theater class, we talked about the playwrights. I was like, I’m doing the wrong thing.  KAUFMAN I always was into theater and writing. I wrote my first play in a high school drama class. And then I tried to do a lot of other things. I graduated from college and was doing all kinds of weird jobs and I was like, I think I want to be a playwright.  KAUFMAN I was a Spanish teacher and a nanny and a barista.  KREIMENDAHL I did construction, remodeling.  BARBAGALLO I was a bartender, I taught school. I work at a magazine now, “Us Weekly.” I’m a researcher.  What were your early plays about?  KREIMENDAHL A kid who had a webcam show and who was cyber-bullied and who killed himself live on the webcam. It was a dark comedy.  BARBAGALLO I was doing a really haphazard Marie Kondo of my apartment and I found a play I wrote when I was 16 or 17. The tone is like a skewed sitcom, like Edward Albee if he wrote plays when he was three.  KAUFMAN “Shatter” was about a mad scientist who made a computer program to put together every combination of sounds and notes in the world so that no one could ever write new music again.  And when did your birth gender start to feel uncomfortable?  BARBAGALLO From puberty. But I had no way to talk about it. I used to hide myself in lots of layers of clothing. And then when I was in college, I had the classic hair-cutting moment. All of a sudden my teachers were more interested in me. I started getting cast in stuff. I started dating a lot more.  KAUFMAN I definitely took a really, really long time to choose trans as a label. It was after multiple years of trying out a different pronoun with friends that I was like, I think I could demand that the world respect me this way. That was when I was in grad school. I had a different name then. I started introducing myself as MJ.  BARBAGALLO Only my mother still calls me by my birth name. My parents knew that I had top surgery, but we don’t put the specific language on it.  KREIMENDAHL I’ve been Basil for 11 years. I guess because my birth name is so feminine it never felt right. My mom still calls me it. I’m not really out to my parents either. It’s not a topic of conversation. But I think that’s going to happen soon. I’m about to get married. We don’t want this confusion when I’m the groom.  Are you out to your parents, MJ?  KAUFMAN My moms are lesbian, so they definitely have a reference point when I came out to them. They are very supportive in their own way.  Do you have concerns about being pigeonholed as a trans playwright?  BARBAGALLO I don’t like being tokenized or feeling that other parts of my person are overshadowed. Sometimes when people are asking me to speak on a panel or to come lecture, I’m like, come see my play. Come see the art.  KAUFMAN That happens to me a lot, too. They’ll see my work and the only thing they’ll have to say is, “It’s so exciting you’re writing a trans story. It’s so great to see queer and trans characters.” Can you say one thing about craft?  KREIMENDAHL I hope I’m seen as a playwright. I move in the world that way. I don’t feel like Rattlestick is doing “Orange Julius” because I’m trans. In San Francisco, they did market my play “Sidewinders” as very queer and the play was not about that. It was about being human. So people came expecting to see a trans narrative and then were disappointed.  How strong are the autobiographical elements in what you write?  KREIMENDAHL “Orange Julius” is the most personal play I’ve ever written.  BARBAGALLO In early plays I wrote I was the protagonist, plays about a screwed up 20-something. But as the years have gone on, I am so much less interesting to myself.  KAUFMAN There’s some of myself in all of my work. I have noticed recently that I have a number of plays where there’s a transmasculine person with a dead father.  None of you has written a traditional trans coming-out narrative. Do those stories interest you?  KREIMENDAHL Nooo. I’ve never been interested in the coming-out narrative at all. There’s so much more to write about.  KAUFMAN I do think that one of the reasons I resisted the trans label for so long was the only way I had encountered it was the story of someone who is born in the wrong body and then they get surgery and they take hormones and they transition and then they’ve found themselves. That’s not true for me and for most of the trans people I know.  You’ve all written gender nonconforming characters. Is it important to you that gender nonconforming actors play those roles?  BARBAGALLO Trans roles, roles specifically for trans people, should be played by trans actors. That’s pretty simple.  KAUFMAN Definitely. Though I am trying to push the conversation away from this authenticity bias of who can do the role most realistically and toward a labor justice question of who’s getting cast and who’s not. Trans actors have a harder time getting cast even in trans roles and this shouldn’t be true.  KREIMENDAHL We have enough actors out there. It’s worth reaching out, outside the normal ways of casting.  BARBAGALLO I’ve been asked to come in and read for trans women. I think that might be just about the worst casting choice you could make. There are really gifted performers working who have not necessarily been through conservatory training who could strengthen the fabric of our theater if you reached out to them.  How do you feel about transgender narratives written by people who aren’t transgender?  BARBAGALLO Ooh! It’s hot right now!  KREIMENDAHL There’s something that just goes, that’s not really my story, that’s a straight version of my story.  KAUFMAN I don’t see very many cis writers writing about trans experience responsibly. I would love to see that. There’s an unfortunate compounding problem that theaters would rather produce work about us, not by us right now. We should get to tell our own stories first.  A version of this article appears in print on November 13, 2016, on page AR8 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘We Should Get to Tell Our Own Stories’. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The playwrights MJ Kaufman, Basil Kreimendahl and Jess Barbagallo discuss attitudes toward transgender artists, and their own recent works.