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This is actually a really astute take that I've never considered or even seen implied before. But it rings very true.
It also kind of reminds me of my weird opinion on drag queens. I can't stand drag queens because I instinctively feel an aggressive competitiveness when I see them. They are basically men performing femininity in a competitive (masculine) way. They make me mad because I feel like I could be a better drag queen than them, which is a really masculine response to have, but simultaneously it implies that I am good at performing femininity, which is an irritating realization I have to contend with.
If an MTF trans woman wants to join the 1% of beautiful women, in my mind, that is an essentially male/competitive worldview bulldozing the reality of the 99% of femininity and what it is to be female, in a way.
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I'm not quite sure how to respond to this, so forgive me if I come off as too defensive, but...
There's clearly some truth in what you're saying, in that no boy who wants to be a girl, or man who wants to be a woman, really knows what it's like to be the other sex, and fills in their lack of knowledge with rosy fantasy in their imagination. But I don't think that this is (usually) an implicit comparison to the 99th percentile, just some amount of generic idealization. My first crush, the one I had weird thoughts about wanting to be, was just some sweet-but-awkward girl who went to my church; and maybe I was just relatively oblivious but I doubt an 11-year-old has any concept, accurate or not, of what kind of life a spectacularly beautiful woman would lead.
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This seems very analogous to a similar and mirrored phenomenon I've been noticing in a non-trans context. Which is, feminists looking at the lives of extremely successful men and ascertaining that but for the patriarchy keeping them down, women could all live lives like those 99th percentile men. When, in fact, the lives of a 99th percentile man is just as out of reach for basically every man as it is for every woman.
One particularly acute example of this I saw recently was in the show Velma - which I haven't watched but watched this clip of - which involved the title character, an Indian-American girl, dressing up as a man and immediately being considered attractive by all the women in school while doing gross things like burping or eating garbage, getting a job over a woman by handing in a paper scribble resume saying "I'm male," winning an art competition over a woman who painted an intricate beautiful painting by rubbing "his" butt over some paint and then over some canvas, and immediately being listened to when taking over a stage during a dance party to order people to go home. The idea that a short, chubby, effeminate Indian boy would enjoy such social/professional advantages in such settings is... something I would consider delusional at best, and the delusion is understandable if the thinking is that every man goes through life like a 99th percentile man.
More broadly, these just seem like the Apex Fallacy.
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