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Ed Gein, infamous for exhuming corpses from nearby graveyards so that he could fashion a "woman suit" resembling his deceased mother and literally crawl inside "her", was arrested in 1957. The case inspired Robert Bloch's 1959 novel Psycho (the film adaptation came out the following year) and Thomas Harris's 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. The latter novel bent over backwards to clarify that its villain, Jame Gumb, is not actually transgender (the 1991 film adaptation wasn't quite as emphatic, but still includes a line of dialogue in which Hannibal Lecter explicitly states that Gumb only thinks he's a transsexual, but isn't really).
This actually strikes me as a case which an American in the 1950s would have a much easier time comprehending than a modern American. A modern American hears about a cross-dressing man with breast implants and far-right opinions committing a horrendous act of violence and splutters "this is statistically rare, trans people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators*, anyway how do we know he was really trans". An American in the 1950s would hear about a man committing a horrendous act of violence, read that he also enjoyed cross-dressing and had received breast implants, and would think "well, that checks out. The writing was on the wall."
*As pointed out by Freddie deBoer in the context of mental illness, this claim is true, but vacuously so: violent crimes are committed by such a small minority of individuals that "[demographic] is more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator" is true of literally every demographic you care to mention: men, women, old people, young people, white people, black people, trans people, cis people.
In general views on transsexuals before the 2010s were either similar to or more tolerant than those on gay men. The extreme example for the latter case is obviously the Iranian situation but I think a lot of mainstream American media in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s was also broadly sympathetic to people we would today call transwomen. Even many examples of the ‘trans panic’ thing often framed the transwoman sympathetically if present-day politically incorrectly, like Chandler’s dad in Friends.
Ages ago, when I was on an Internet Atheist board, a trans woman showed up, and started arguing for proto-SJW/woke ideas. The kind of shit they got in response, from all the Obama-loving liberals that the forum consisted of, would get people banned from here let alone any mainstream space. This was either late 00's or early 10's.
People definitely were not more tolerant them than of gay people.
Did they object because the person was a trans woman or because they were arguing for proto-SJW/woke ideas?
The proto-woke ideas were related to trans issues so it's kinda hard to tell. One interaction that got stuck in my mind went something like:
Would you sleep with a trans woman?
Sure! As long as it washes itself.
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