Transgender History
by Susan Stryker
Much better than I expected! Not terribly detailed, but does a really good job of putting people and organizations like Harry Benjamin, Sharon Stone, and ACT UP in context for their times. I also appreciated the bit at the end where the origins of queer theory are outlined, although the terminology started to go a little over my head. (I'm embarrassed to admit I used to get Sharon Stone and Susan Stryker confused before reading this book... they have the same initials, dammit. Now I won't, though, because one of the last gray-boxed "asides" is an interesting snippet of Stryker's interview of Stone.)
"Transgender history" might be a misnomer: it's unapologetically focused on the U.S. history of transgender activism in the last century. But considering that that's where the Western word/concept of transgender mostly arose and developed, the choice makes more sense than trying to sweep what the West perceives as gender variance in non-Western cultures under the umbrella, and trying to extend the term backwards in time to people who didn't live in the same world we do.