An Evening with Sophie Summers in Bognor Regis

This past summer I travelled to Bognor Regis in the UK to meet up with and be made over by notable crossdressing youtuber Sophie Summers. Here’s a bit about my crossdressing experience with Sophie.

Who is Sophie

Sophie Summers is an English crossdresser who owns and operates Translife UK in Bognor Regis. She also has a YouTube channel dedicated to crossdressing identity and assistance.

I’ve been following her on Instagram and YouTube for years. I’ve always found her content to be informative and I found her openness to discussing aspects of her identity that others might have trouble confronting to be refreshing, but also something that I wish I had myself.

Why Did I Go

I’ve been to a professional makeover service in the past. It’s always usually a thrilling, but fairly similar experience. This time though, I wanted something a bit different.

I wanted to try and unravel the tangle of thoughts that usually occupy my brain regarding my dressing and femme identity, and I thought that meeting and talking through some things with Sophie would leave me with a more coherent picture of my own gender identity.

I was able to exchange several emails with Sophie in the weeks before arriving in Bognor Regis to pin down exactly what was possible to do and achieve.

Bognor is a smallish town on the south coast of England and I was hoping to have a nice summers’ walk by the seaside en femme, take some photos and have some dinner.

Sophie is very generous with her time and didn’t put a fixed time limit on our meeting and our evening would go how it would go depending on what we wanted to do or how I felt at the time.

She’s also very responsive to emails; can say nothing but good things about her communicativeness.

On the day, the weather didn’t cooperate, as it has a tendency to do in England, it was rainy, windy and chilly.

Not a fun afternoon or evening to be out and about, let alone in make-up and a dress; I would’ve been so worried that my wig would blow off and I’d be chasing it down the beach in some heels. Just the thought of the sight it would be makes me giggle a bit.

I was fairly nervous as I walked from my hotel to Sophie’s studio, I arrived early and calmed myself with a cigarette before I knocked on the door.

Discussion & Preparation

Sophie met me at her front door and took me to her charming little studio. Over a cup of tea, we discussed how I envisioned my feminine style;

We also talked about deeper things like my past experiences as a dresser, how I hoped to improve my skills and my motivations for wanting to do so.

I’ll say that Sophie’s questions were more probing and insightful than when I have done something similar in the past.

Sophie was able to blend our discussion about my crossdressing identity into a conversation about style.

We began to choose clothes. I am partial to a clingy dress while being dressed in order to show off whatever curves I’m attempting to achieve and to make myself feel extra pretty.

Sophie’s wardrobe is large and she has loads of combinations to play with. In the end, we narrowed my choices down to 2 possible dresses, wigs, and shoes, leaving the final choice to be made after we had talked more and done makeup.

Experience

After finishing our tea, Sophie left me in the studio with some foundation garments to put on and I got ready. It was just a few minutes until she returned and I put on a dressing gown and we began to work on my face. I was very interested in learning more about cosmetics and how to apply them to my face to transform it.

Sophie was incredibly patient and went over everything with me. My only regret is that I didn’t take notes or take instructions step by step photos of my own face.

However, I can take away a few very important lessons about shading and contouring that I am applying to my own admittedly beginner practice at home. I was shown all the products that were used to transform me and a rationale for using it.

It seemed like the number of powders and brushes would never end until Sophie finished and my femme face emerged.

This is when my experience took a bit of a turn from my past makeover experiences. Usually once the make-up is done and outfits are chosen, it’s time for photos and more photos.

While I took one or two with my final look; Sophie is more about enjoying the experience and using the time for enjoyment. I had said I wanted to go have a bite and discuss dressing with her, and so that what was planned, rain be damned.

One thing that I should mention here that I thought was very considerate of Sophie was that she noticed I wore glasses and was having trouble seeing myself in the mirror while doing my make up. She loaned me a pair with a similar prescription so I wouldn’t have to be out in my nerdy manly glasses, and rather had a more femme pair of frames.

We went out, chose a restaurant, sat down and had a nice long chat. I can say that walking from Sophie’s studio to the restaurant was not scary for me.

Sophie was with me, arm in arm, being very encouraging and supportive the whole time. I mentioned that I had never been out to a café as a woman before, and I would be nervous about my voice, Sophie took it upon herself to order for us, so I didn’t have to be more nervous than I was.

Our dinner was a lovely time; I was able to hear about another more experienced crossdresser’s journey firsthand.

Reflection

Thinking about that dinner now, I think it was a huge push forward for me to be more accepting of myself as a crossdresser, but also to be a bit less concerned or worried about why I like to be a crossdresser.

Sophie was able to share one story from her past and when she was able to make a bit more sense of her gender identity.

The story revolved around making a mind map about her interests, her work and every aspect of all parts of her life and to then color in different bubbles to show her enthusiasm for each bit.

She said that most of the bright colors ended up on the crossdresser side of herself; the message was self-evident. Most of the positivity she felt at that time was about her femme side.

Listening to this story has sort of made me realize that I needed to the same thought exercise. As I did it, I ended up not having so many bubbles around my femme identity and felt that I wanted some more.

The more we talked, the more Sophie was reassuring that she had heard similar stories before or had similar experiences herself.

The whole day just felt as if it was the first time I’d been engaged as a woman, interacted with as a woman. It’s left me more comfortable with my own self and willing to take a deeper leap into my own femininity.