An interesting if all more complicated question (December talking points)
oracne asks 'do you have any interesting facts about trans people around the turn of the century in England?'.
Which is one of those 'it all depends' questions, on how you would define trans people, and how we can interpret existing historical evidence.
E.g. there is this late C19th photograph album of cross-dressed men, but we really don't know enough about the context. Some of them are theatrical drag, but others? One is tentatively identified as Park of the Boulton and Park case.
Sexologists were beginning to differentiate between transvestites who cross-dressed for the sexual thrill and individuals we would now consider trans: see Havelock Ellis in Eonism. Magnus Hirschfeld's work was mostly based upon continental cases but he did have people coming to his institute from all over: some of his work was translated into English and put together in a volume called Sexual Anomalies and Perversions, intended as a memorial tribute.
I've probably mentioned before Alison Oram's study, Her Husband Was A Woman! women's gender crossing in modern British popular culture (2007), which mostly looks at cases which came into the popular press where it turned out, through an accident, or being called up during WW1, that someone assumed to be a married man was a woman.
However, Oram was working before the massive digitisation of newspapers and was using mostly The News of the World. I am fairly confident that searching the British Newspaper Archive would come up with a whole lot more cases, including in local papers. However - you may hear my miffed cries from the moon - even though I have a British Library card, even registered readers, even in the present circumstance, cannot access this remotely free of charge, only on-site. REALLY. So searching a plausible date span for terms such as 'man-woman' brings up some likely headlines but one can no longer even preview the actual articles.
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