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The point of "cis-by-default" is that most people don't have a "gender identity" in the sense that transactivists use the term. (Google AI provides the definition "Gender identity is a person's internal, deeply felt sense of being a man, woman, both, neither, or another gender..." which I think is consistent with transactivist use). I don't have an internal, deeply felt sense of being a man - I just am one. The question of "how would you feel if you woke up in a female body?" doesn't make sense - I am my body as well as my brain, and the person who had a female body (complete with different musculature, menstruation, gonads that secrete oestrogen etc.) would be a different person.
I think the concept of gender identity is incoherent and nobody has a gender identity - some people have preferred gender roles that don't match their biological sex, and some people have fetishes which mean they can get off by performing a gender role that doesn't match their biological sex. But if tomboys and femme queens think they "really are" the other sex it is because transactivists tell them to, not because they have an "internal, deeply felt sense of being..."
The original essay is available online. I get that you're trying to reject its assumptions, but I don't think you're really succeeding at it so much as arguing over definitions.
If we replace the Ranma or Ozy's thought experiment instead with "how would you react if a mad-but-exceptionally-skilled plastic surgeon kidnapped you and gave you the exact outside appearance and vocal patterns of the opposite gender, without messing with your gonads, menses, yada yada; we'll call the population that had this done to them momen and sound like a bad scifi flick, they're tots not women-in-your-specific-sense", and one half of the subject population immediately slit their own throat, and the other half got slightly annoyed about having to replace their wardrobe and learn how bras work, it'd be compatible with your claim and Ozy's.
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You can imagine a sci-fi scenario where your brain is transplanted into a female body. You’d still be you. Exposure to oestrogen would change your personality to an extent, but it wouldn’t be instantaneous, and it would be a lot more limited than if you had been exposed to it in the womb or during childhood.
Now of course brain transplants are currently purely theoretical but cross-sex hormone therapy isn’t. Cis men who have taken oestrogen (more common in the past to treat testicular or prostate cancer) report higher incidences of depression, anxiety, body image issues from feminisation, loss of libido and sexual dysfunction, and emotional volatility.
Meanwhile trans women usually report the opposite and their mental health is improved from the exact same hormones. Weirder anecdotal reports are cis men complaining of brain fog from taking oestrogen, while trans women saying the hormones actually lifted their brain fog.
It's actually very much in doubt to what extent "you" resides in your brain specifically -- the nervous system is much more complicated than that.
You don't think that those symptoms could be related to, y'know -- having cancer at all?
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Would you mind providing a link to this study? I've heard the opposite from the recent controversy over the "mermaids" charity and Cass review, so I'd be interested to see the other perspective on it.
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The thing with Cis-by-default is that the whole point of a default is that you don‘t need to describe it. You can save those bits of information. If you refer to someone as a man, all the default qualities are implied – het, ‚cis‘, normal in every way - unless otherwise specified. Queer theory and the trans movement produce verbal pollution, forcing people to specify useless information we leave out/imply („my pronouns are he/him“). Because they‘re autists who have a hard time with implicit clues. Instead of brave rebels asking questions no one dared to, they force people to repeat answers everyone already knew.
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