“What can I do to make this easier for you?”

It was a simple sounding question but it is doubtful whether Eddie Howe has spoken 10 more significant or life-changing words to another staff member at AFC Bournemouth. They were directed at Sophie Cook who, having left at the end of the triumphant 2014-15 season as Steve – or, as she also now puts it a “22-stone bald bloke” – returned in the expectation that professional football could no longer be part of her life. A few months earlier, in his job as club photographer, Steve had been chronicling Bournemouth’s historic promotion to the Premier League.

“I was being sprayed by champagne and I was terrified,” she now says. “I believed that it was my last game. I didn’t think there was a future in football for a transgender woman. It was unheard of. I thought the reaction would be so negative.”

Two years on and, not only has Sophie become the first transgender person to work in the Premier League, she is also standing in the general election as the Labour candidate for East Worthing and Shoreham.

Most important of all, at the age now of 50, she is no longer self-harming and free of suicidal thoughts for the first sustained period of her adult life. “I hadn’t known that this level of comfort, self-awareness and happiness was even a possibility,” she says, gazing at the sea from her Sussex flat.