Tommy Dorfman Has Truly Been Living Her Best Life Since Coming Out As Trans

In a new cover interview with InStyle, 13 Reasons Why star Tommy Dorfman has opened up about how happy she's been since clarifying that she is a transgender woman.

  InStyle / Anthony Maule / Via Instagram: @anthony.maule / instyle.com

"I just switched my hormones, and I've never felt better in my life," she said in a deep-diving Q&A. "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."

"Two weeks into having estrogen in my body, I was like, 'Oh,'" she continued. "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.' And 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 opened up about feeling fearful she wouldn't be accepted among her peers back home. "There are some people that I grew up with in the South who I thought I was never going to see again," she said. "So it was nice to get text messages and calls from people I grew up going to NASCAR with or who you would expect to be incredibly conservative and not accepting."

Tommy, who will soon star in Lena Dunham's upcoming film Sharp Stick, told Time back in July, "For a year now, I have been privately identifying and living as a woman — a trans woman."

"I’ve been living in this other version of coming out where I don't feel safe enough to talk about it, so I just do it," she added. "But I recognize that transitioning is beautiful. Why not let the world see what that looks like? So I kept, on Instagram, a diaristic time capsule instead — one that shows a body living in a more fluid space."

Tommy Dorfman
Gotham / GC Images / Getty Images

You can read the full InStyle interview here.