So here it is at last…Katie’s Girl Guide, offering advice and opinions on all matters tranny. Katie’s reputation on TrannyWeb is huge (and rightly so), which suggests the book should be this season’s Must-Have item. Could it live up to the reputation of its author?

The book itself comes in digital format only, and you can download it if you have a working copy of Microsoft Windows. I suppose that caters for 95% of all computers in use. If you have a Mac, you can still download it if you have emulation software installed such as Parallels or VM Fusion. You can only read the book on the screen but at least the pages turn in a pleasingly natural way. As with other digital documents, there’s a “Go to page…” facility and you can also go immediately to the start and end of the book.

The book is about 300 pages long and contains 20 chapters on a range of subjects including tranny psychology, hair and wigs, dressing services, body shape and so on. There are some autobiographical chapters where Katie relates her development as a tranny – here it’s obvious that she’s speaking from deeply-felt personal experience. There are also lots of tips or secrets. Even the most experienced tranny will probably find something new here. For me it was the advice on using female pheromones to convey a hidden sense of femininity.

The biggest single theme in the book is the importance of being convincing in one’s attempt to pass as a woman. Katie recommends aiming for nothing less than perfection – taking all opportunities to study women, practising their movements, even training your voice to sound female. Her advice must be right but it is bound to seem intimidating to the stay-at-home girl.

Katie has a light and engaging style, almost conversational at times, and this makes the book easy to read. I found the pages skipped by, although I slowed down towards the end (so much advice to take in…).

Almost every page has a picture of a woman on it. These are not famous people, just ordinary women being themselves and often looking beautiful too. Katie explains that the intention was not only to make the book nice to look at, but also to show us (the tranny readership) what we’re aiming for. This works very well. At first I wondered why Katie hadn't used photos of trannies but I can see that wouldn't have worked so well.

Katie speaks from personal experience – and sometimes refuses to go beyond it, if she feels she has nothing particular to offer, for example when she refuses to provide tips on make-up. Here I thought she could have made use of material she had seen and thought worthwhile. A section on plucking and how to style one’s eyebrows, for example, would go well with her description of what the end product (the female eyebrow) looks like.

The book is digital and Katie has inserted some links to other sites. I think she could have done more of this and enhanced the book’s value as a work of reference. For example on dressing services where she limits yourself to a link to the Boudoir. I would personally have been interested in links to tranny-friendly hairdressers who would show me how to style my hair in a feminine way.

One thing Katie must do if she reprints is insert page numbers into the contents page so we know where each chapter starts. At the moment there's no way of finding any particular chapter except by reading through from the start.

Overall I think the book is very good. Not only does it contain lots of good advice, it could be inspirational for those of us whose circumstances prevent us dressing as often as we would like.