Tommy Dorfman Says She Would Have Transitioned Sooner If It Wasn’t For ’13 Reasons Why’



“I think if I hadn’t booked this job, I would have started the transition much sooner,” Dorfman told Rachel Bilson on her “Broad Ideas” podcast. “I think because my work is (sic) so tied to my body and my face and my identity, and everything that I’ve been identified with, it’s delayed some of my growth and maturation. mid-twenties.”
Dorfman said she was cast for “13 reasons why” at age 24, and even then she was battling gender dysphoria. But in the series, a controversial but widely watched teen drama that premiered in 2017, Dorfman played a gay and cisgender man, a situation that led her to “compartmentalize” the parts of her that questioned her identify.

“To me, I feel like I was stuck in time for a minute,” she said of her casting on the show, for which she also expressed her gratitude. “When it came to anything to do with dysphoria or gender or stuff that was already really there, I was like, ‘no, it’s not for now.'”

Dorfman also compared the first year of sobriety — she’s been sober since she was 21, she told Bilson — to her first year of life as a trans woman and the milestones she’s taken. Only this time, she says, is she reaching those milestones very publicly.

“I felt like I had to do all those things again as a woman,” Dorfman said. “As my body takes on a new shape and form, more organically, like due to hormones, then I face new challenges.”

Dorfman had transitioned privately a year before his 2021 interview with Time. She called the announcement a “reintroduction of me as a woman.”