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FWIW I agree with both @hydroacetylene and you here, and I expect that he'd agree with you too. What I would mean, and what I expect he means, by "trans isn't real" is that none of the people being classified as "trans" are "born into the wrong body" or "assigned" the wrong gender, nor are they "really" (in some sense) the opposite sex -- that it's not just a matter of overdiagnosis and a classification of some people as "trans" who aren't, while there is still some smaller subset who are "really trans" and where that the most appropriate treatment is the constellation of "gender-affirming" (what a euphemism!) treatments of hormones/surgery/social transition/etc.
I do agree that there is a separate mental illness (probably more than one) which correspond to "trans" -- that it's not just depression or anxiety or whatever that causes boys/men to want to be girls/women (or vice-versa), or to be unhappy because they aren't, or to (at times) convince themselves that they "really are" what they want to be. And I get that there are some people who don't believe that and think that the entirety of "trans" is just some current-day-cultural nonsense. But I do think that there is a meaningful and important sense in which "trans isn't real" is true, and I think that's what he's getting at.
Yes I doubt we all disagree very much, but some things deserve to be stated at least inasmuch as it allows us to map things out.
The story we've all been told (i.e.: there are people born with brains that correspond to the other sex and bringing their bodies in line with their brain heals them) has many problems, not least of which the fact that it has incredibly little to no evidence supporting it. In this at least, "trans isn't real". But the problem is the alternatives, like Blanchardism, are really no better on that front.
There's a deep irony in the fact that learning more would require pretty wild experimentation that would and has been suppressed by a political movement that is hell bent on large scale experimentation but only of a very specific kind.
If there's one thing we ought to learn from this it is that building identities around specific medical treatments is a terrible idea. And it's a mistake we keep making. See the weirder parts of the deaf community for another example.
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