Thirty-year-old Tommy Dorfman is engaged to “a gay girl” about a year after ending a five-year-long marriage and publicly identifying as a transgender woman, the star announced this week.
Speaking to actress Rachel Bilson on her “Broad Ideas” podcast, Dorfman revealed the partner in question is a woman who doesn’t fetishize the “Jane the Virgin” alum for being transgender.
“I fell in love with someone who doesn’t fetishize me,” Dorfman told Bilson. The star described the bride-to-be as “just a gay girl,” adding that their relationship is “very affirming.”
Last year, Dorfman, known as Ryan Shaver on “13 Reasons Why,” split from Peter Zurkuhlen after they were married for five years.
“I knew I was interested in women in a way that I hadn’t really been aware of since high school,” Dorfman said during the podcast. “I had this unresolved, unexplored thing. I was like, ‘This is the year that I’m gonna go on some dates with girls and feel that out again, and not feel ashamed about it.’”
Tommy Dorfman in 2019 // Gonzalo Marroquin/Getty Images for American Eagle
Around the same time as the split, the star publicly identified as a woman and announced last August the use of hormones to transition.
The transition would have come sooner, Dorfman said, were it not for the artist’s roles and the delay they caused.
“I think if I hadn’t booked that job I would have transitioned a lot sooner,” Dorfman said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “I think because of my work being so tied to my body and face and identity, or whatever [a character] identified as, it delayed some of my growth and some of my maturation in my 20s. I made decisions that were just not aligned with how I really was or what I wanted — but out of fear.”
While still a young adult, Dorfman started to live a sober lifestyle after battling alcoholism, which the entertainer compared to body dysphoria.
“I think if you’re living with dysphoria, it’s not so dissimilar to living actively in alcoholism or addiction,” Dorfman said. “You’re living in a fog. You’re living underwater, basically.”
“For me, I always felt like other people had a guidebook for life that I just did not [have],” the artist continued. “I would always be like, ‘How did you know how to brush your teeth twice a day?’ That’s crazy. Or, ‘You know how to make a bed?’ Or these simple basic human things that were just not available to me. Or, like, emotions. I was like, ‘You feel emotions outside of acting? That’s weird.’ The acting was the only way I could feel things until I started transitioning. Then it was like, boom!”