BANG Showbiz English
Tommy Dorfman’s husband has filed for divorce.
The ’13 Reasons Why’ star came out as transgender in July 2021, and now, her husband Peter Zurkuhlen has submitted documents, obtained by TMZ this week, to end their marriage after five years.
The pair became engaged in April 2015, after meeting through a mutual friend, and tied the knot a year later.
Tommy previously admitted the pair had transitioned into friends rather than lovers.
She said: “I was in a nine-year relationship in which I was thought of as a more male-bodied person, with a gay man.
“I love him so much, but we’ve been learning that as a trans woman, what I’m interested in is not necessarily reflected in a gay man. So we’ve had incredible conversations to redefine our relationship as friends.”
Meanwhile, Tommy previously explained that her “spirit was attuned to whatever it means to be a woman”.
She said: “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. 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. Trans women would clock me all the time and be like, ‘Hey, girl, what’s up?’ because it’s sort of a thing you recognise.”
Tommy has received positive reactions from unexpected places since coming out, including from people she grew up with that she thought she would “never see again”.
She added: “There are some people that I grew up with in the South who I thought I was never going to see again. 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. But to see me, someone they knew as a child, stepping into this space in a public way helped them wrap their heads around it.”
The 29-year-old actress has been taking hormones and is already seeing the positive effects.
She said in August: “I just switched my hormones, and I’ve never felt better in my life. 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****** unhappy I was in every photo. It’s wild.”
