Gender non-conforming? Do you mean homosexual, or just people who failed to conform to the society's expectations of the behaviour and dress appropriate to their sex?
Yes, body dysphoria in many forms has existed for a very long time; but people being horrified with and uncomfortable about having two legs has never meant anyone felt their healthy limbs should be cut off to gratify their delusions; they have been treated as having a mental rather than a physical affliction, as have people who have believed in the face of all evidence that they were horribly fat. Belief that you are Napoleon doesn't mean that you actually are a Corsican dictator, as far as I know.
Also as far as I can tell, a vast majority of the activists are no more trans-sexual than I am, and the vast majority even of those who claim to be trans-sexual have not the least intention of having any actual surgery to modify their bodies even though that surgery is available (many of them appear to think that hormone treatments are all reversible, which is not the case). Tragically, it has been made altogether too easy for troubled young women who have had abusive childhoods or have mental conditions which make female puberty abhorrent to them to have their healthy breasts removed surgically, something which makes the "de-transitioning" which seems to be what is done by a high proportion of troubled adolescents a few years down the line a great deal more difficult for them to do.
I am reasonably certain that before the interval between WWI and WWII (ie some time in the thirties) it had never even been suggested that any human being could change their sex without divine intervention (nobody was talking about gender then apart from linguists who used the word for a fairly specific purpose nothing to do with the sex of an individual). And I am also fairly sure that there may have been cosmetic operations done before 1952, but that was when the first one involving both castration surgery and hormone treatment was carried out in order to attempt to make a male person appear female in all respects. (I am unsure how successful the attempt was: I look at photographs of George/Christine Jorgensen and the person still looks pretty male to me. Male making a good attempt to look like a female vamp. to be sure, but that wasn't new.)
I do not regard men having their genitals cut off as "transitioning" (eunuchs and castrati made no such claim) any more than women cutting off their breasts is (religious frenzy can have a lot to answer for). Mutilation, voluntary or involuntary, has existed for as long as history has been being written down, but it's an unfortunate fact rather than evidence that people transitioned. Similarly, men dressing as women or women dressing as men may have all sorts of reasons but is not evidence of transitioning, and nor is a woman claiming in a speech to have the heart and stomach of a king of England.
Yes, there have been people who would have liked to be members of the other sex from the one they actually belonged to, but there was nothing to be done about this desire until less than a century ago – apart from leave home for a distant town, dress differently, and hope nobody noticed that your were deceiving them. And lord lord I am tired of homosexuals (or actors) having dressed up as members of a different sex from their own being taken as evidence of transsexuality rather than transvestism.