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I think you underestimate the variety of the human experience, both objectively (in terms of how other people might act differently around you vs your women friends) and subjectively (in terms of how those women friends may perceive the same actions differently than you). Just to take some examples from this thread, I'm sure in your thousands of hours riding transit you've seen people of all genders brush up against other people of all genders. If you mentally categorize all those incidents as "someone accidentally brushed someone else, no sexual harassment" but some fraction of the women brushed by men categorize some fraction of those incidents as "he deliberately groped me, sexual harassment" then the apparent gap between your perception and theirs is already explained. It doesn't even need to be that you aren't seeing these events, only that you mentally categorize them differently than the subject of them.
That aside, I think the underlying reasoning is not very good. As best I can tell the basis for thinking your friends are lying is just because their experiences don't match your observations. I perceive the underlying logic as something like
The only way this reasoning works is on the assumption that your experience of doing X is typical, that it is representative of what others experiences will be like. I think this is a bad assumption generally but is especially bad when applied across genders on the topic of sexual harassment.
I also wonder how far you take this logic. Do you believe any women have ever been harassed on the transit you frequently ride? The logic in your post doesn't just work for your friends accounts, after all, but would be applicable to any woman claiming to have been harassed. If you think women have been harassed despite your lack of observation, why can't your friends be in that group?
Finally I do not find your proposed explanations very convincing and expect you would be quite resistant to these explanations if someone tried to apply them to you. "You say you've had experience X, but I've never seen it. You're just telling yourself a lie so you can continue believing in your political ideology in the face of contrary evidence." How often would you say the foregoing sentence described you? Why do you think you know your women friends and their experiences better than they know themselves? On the basis of what evidence?
Well, the 'why do they think random brushing is groping' still needs to be explained, because random brushing isn't groping.
Or maybe one doesn't notice actual groping if you're halfway across the subway car, because it just looks like someone moving slightly and the person next to them moving away a few seconds later, idk
That particular claim is a weird psychoanalytic thing, but most people are very wrong about many aspects of their experiences, so it definitely can happen.
My point is that the distinction between "random brushing" and "groping" is, at least in part, dependent on an imputation of intention to the person making the contact. Whether some particular contact is brushing or groping can be underdetermined by observation of the occurrence.
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