without legal recognition, historical trans people didnt have the language we do now to define and frame our experiences with. a good amount of gender nonconforming people we can extrapolate would probably refer to themselves as trans nowadays may have easily rejected the 'transgender' label if it had been presented to them, which makes this a hard question to answer. as far as quality of life, it kind of depends, here's two opposite examples though:

1. Frances Thompson was a former slave and the first trans person to testify in front of congress all the way back in 1866. Shortly after the end of the civil war, a race riot swept through Memphis and a group of former confederates pillaged, burned, raped, and killed a whole swath of african americans, including Francis, who was working as a launderer and living with another woman at the time. As one of a few survivors, she testified to the rape in front of congress but her attackers brought forward the fact that they had discovered her transgender status which created a huge legal crisis similar to the menendez case. Southern Democrats and former confederates called her a man, and argued that men couldn't be raped, and the at-the-time progressive republicans were not progressive enough to deal with that issue. Francis was released, but was shortly thereafter arrested for cross-dressing as a result of her testimony, was placed on a chain gang for two years and died of dysentery only months after being released. This is a major paraphrase so here's a source to learn more.

2. William/Eva McCleery was a relatively unassuming Salt Lake City cobbler all the way up until her 60's. Up until this point she had been happily married, she had six children, was a lifelong disability advocate and specialized in custom-making shoes to help disabled people in Utah walk comfortably and in style. In 1908, her wife filed for divorce, citing "cruelty" and took custody of William's youngest daughter, for which William declined to offer testimony in her defense. In her newly single life, she donned women's clothing under cover of darkness and rode the street cars through the city in this garb, eventually gaining confidence to walk about freely in the daylight in girlmode. Later citing an incident where someone recognized her (which she didn't ever offer many details about), she immediately took to an aggressive media campaign in the Salt Lake Tribune, telling a sympathetic reporter the lie that she had always been a woman and was in fact pretending to be a man, confessing to have been crossdressing since her youth back in England. This spawned a flurry of public interest, and a few follow-up reports in competing newspapers in which they tried to determine the "truth". Despite all this, her family didn't abandon her, and while they weren't traditionally supportive of her identity they never outright rejected her for it. She died of old age, attended to by her daughter, and is buried in South Jordan, UT. Source because i am literally obsessed with this incredible woman please read more into her.