What happened before hormone treatment and surgery were available?

Reddwolff

They are filming a drama series at the moment about one such gender non conforming lesbian called anne lister. If anyone hasnt heard of her she was amazing - absolutely worth five minutes of your life to google her. I am really worried that they are going to posthumously trans her, though.

Children (male and female) in the past were in dresses for a large part of childhood because there wasn't the modern zipper or means to disrobe quickly when toilet training. This often means it can be hard to tell in pictures or photographs the sex of a child but the tip is to look at the hair. Side parting for boy, middle parting for girl.

You can't really look at past clothing trends and styles and paste a modern meaning on them. In past the styles of upper-class clothing for men was ornate and what we'd consider rather feminine today. But it wasn't, it was simply the convention at the time. Also in some eras everyone wore some form of makeup, other times it was effectively banned (or at least you'd be looked down on as a floozy for wearing it.

Otherwise people cross-dressed for various reasons, we know of many examples of women doing so because they were prevented from education and work and needed to do so to support themselves and their families. It was also common in acting as well. Non-conforming dress was common in lesbian and gay communities, and some countries outlawed men wearing women's clothing to try and police gay men (my country wasn't one of them interestingly enough, but the police tried that once and arrested a gay man and tried and failed to prosecute them). We can still find around some surviving images of this, obviously some people flouted the rules where they could.

I think you have answered your own question.

Interesting question.

One French King was close in age to his brother, the younger brother was apparently dressed in what was considered feminine clothing from childhood and it carried on into adulthood.

The French King presenting masculine wore a long hair wig and high heeled shoes.

Macaroni, trends or fashion of the time changes.

Long hair, padded bras, makeup?