Reddit reviews True Sex: The Lives of Trans Men at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Susan Stryker's history is a contemporary history of which I think if you actually read wouldn't find anything controversial. It isn't claiming anyone is trans the way they are now. It gives a preamble of terms, some basic social history of the late 1800s-1950s, and then goes straight the trans revolts of the 60s which she has researched extensively and beyond (which we are all more familiar with).

The Reader isn't a history book, and again, isn't claiming definitive trans identities on long dead people.

Leslie Feinberg's book is also not a history, but the exact kind of speculation that I was referring to. It is an autobiography of someone living outside of gender conventions looking through history to find personalities who resonate. It is not claiming to be definitive history or trying to pass itself off as that, but traces a journey of trying to find oneself in the past. You prob don't read enough academic queer theory books or articles (and this really isn't one), but they have a habit of being over-saturated with puns and and double (and more) entendre. "Making History" is the context clue here. Feinberg is playing with the notion of both uncovering gender-nonconformity and possible translike experiences with letting us know it is Feinberg who is making that history in the uncovering. The personal process of speculation what is at stake here, and the names in the title are just to sell copies. Feinberg is not a historian and the text is not a history, and the book isn't taught as one (besides as a literary memoir of Feinberg hirself).

I'm not denigrating your attempt here. But I'm not seeing iresponsible or poor history scholarship in any of these texts.

Again, Stryker's History is a contemporary advanced 101 for liberal studies educated pop audience.

The reader is a bunch of key texts about transpeople, ranging from early sexologists and the most anti-trans feminist scholars, gathered in one volume. Trans studies is still a thing regardless of whether you think trans people exist. Religious Studies exist too whether you think dieties exist. It is a handy reference, not making claims about particular people's identities.

Feinberg's is a documentation of a personal journey, not a serious argument about the identities of people who live in the past (and ze was strongly critiqued whenever ze insinuated as much despite not being a historian or really doing history, but "making history" in the search itself). Ze is providing a GNC/trans "reading" of the past.

Got any more you want to throw this way showing the transes are stealing women's stories for their own?

I mean, I found this academic monograph written by a historian as history scholarship, True Sex, to be a historical study making claims with lots of traditional historical evidence.