> There “isn’t some magical gap” between cis and trans women? Absurd.

I know, right? Goes against literally every message either of us received growing up. And yet!

The idea that there is a magical gap between men/amab people and women/afab people is one of the deepest held beliefs of humanity. It's just... not true. Humans have fairly low sexual dimorphism among the great apes.

> And then you go on to say that there are no real differences between men and women

That is not what I said. Of course there are differences between men and women. For example, if you ask men what their gender is they'll say "I'm a man" and if you ask women what their gender is they'll say "I'm a woman". Most men have a generally higher testosterone and lower estrogen level than most women. Most men at any level of strength training can lift much more weight than most women at the same level of strength training.

I think you're arguing against the strawman you have of me in your head, probably formed from the composite of a bunch of people you've heard who might have been wrong on this subject while being right about how to treat trans people.

> oblivious to the glaring contradiction between this belief and the entire phenomenon of transgenderism.

This kind of argument is so strange to me. I've heard variations of this a bunch of times, including yours, and "if men can become women and women can become men, what's the point of transitioning?"

When I'm on a testosterone-dominant hormone profile I feel really bad and I hate my body. When I'm on an estrogen-dominant hormone profile I like my body.

When I'm treated as a man by others and have he/him used for me I have clinical levels of social anxiety and depression. When I'm treated as a woman by others I no longer have much anxiety, though I still have occasional depression.

(These are objective and measured by validated psychometric scales over a long period of time, so can I ask you for a kindness? Please don't try and question whether they're real.)

Trans people exist because cis people exist. Many (likely most) people have a sense in their head of what their hormones and other sex characteristics should be like, and how they would like to be treated by other people. For most people it aligns with what they already have or are. For some of us it doesn't. The rest, as they say, is an implementation detail.

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I'm going to ask you a question, if you don't mind -- I want to understand the logical and rhetorical progression that happened during the time you read my post and decided to reply with what you did. Could you outline the series of steps you followed to go from what I said to your response?