Aside from expressing how she feels after reintroducing herself as a transgender woman in a new interview, the '13 Reasons Why' star reveals that switching hormones makes her going through a 'second puberty.'
- Aug 25, 2021
AceShowbiz - Tommy Dorfman is opening up more about living as a transgender woman. In a new interview, the "13 Reasons Why" star stated that she's "genuinely happy" for the first time in her life after coming out.
"I just switched my hormones, and I've never felt better in my life," the actress said in an interview with In Style published on Tuesday, August 24. "I spent 28 years of my life suicidal and depressed and recovering from alcoholism and drug addiction. I don't think I've ever been genuinely happy until this past year. I look at the Internet chronicle of photos of me since I started working and I can see how f**king unhappy I was in every photo. It's wild."
Of switching her hormones, Tommy went on explaining, "Two weeks into having estrogen in my body, I was like, 'Oh.' It felt like I sank into the earth and was grounded. I can sleep now. I wake up moderately happy. I felt it hit, and I was like, 'Let's ride.' " The 29-year-old continued, "As the testosterone leaves my body, I feel so much better. I'm more energized. I feel how I think I was always supposed to feel."
Tommy also noted that the hormones made her go through "second puberty." The "Insatiable" alum shared, "It's a second puberty, and I think you're supposed to go through puberty at an age when you don't remember it because it hurts. It's body-aching and emotionally wonky. But I had an opportunity to be of service. And for the most part, putting it into my work."
Elsewhere in the conversation, Tommy revealed how she had always felt female, but didn't think she'd have the courage to go through with it. "A trans elder asked me what I see myself as when I'm older, when I'm 60, 70, 90. It was so clear, I just saw Cate Blanchett," she told the outlet. "But I really couldn't imagine not being a mother or a grandmother. My spirit was so attuned to whatever it means to be a woman. I've walked in the privilege of a male body, but [being a woman] is all I've known on the inside."
However, Tommy insisted that she won't be changing her name. "I'm named after my mom's brother, who passed a month after I was born, and I feel very connected to that name, to an uncle who held me as he was dying," she told Time magazine. "This is an evolution of Tommy. I'm becoming more Tommy. It is not a transition. Or it is, but not as an idea of going somewhere. Just that I am actually myself."
