Ha! You left out the part where she subtly implies that I must be racist because I've only cited "white Western scientific institutions" (and later, more directly, by comparing trans women to racists moving to the suburbs).
As for tips: you've actually already figured out the answer. Hold onto kindness, stay calm, resist being drawn into a distortion of reality. The facts remain the facts, and the evidence is unassailable. Make them do the work.
The thing I hold onto is that my joy is not imaginary, and it's not something that I can be argued out of. I *love* getting to be me, especially after spending 40 years trying desperately to be someone else. I tried everything I could to be a man instead a woman, and I *failed* at it. Being seen and treated as a man just didn't work for me.
A good analogy: I'm diabetic, and I currently require insulin and medication to manage my blood sugar. Before I had access to insulin I had a long period of denial and burnout when I tried really hard to just ignore the fact that I was diabetic. I ended up in the hospital with acute pancreatitis. I had to get right up to the edge of death before I was able to access the medicine and tools I need to manage my diabetes. But, the result of that is that I have improved my health, my life expectancy, and my quality of life by an order of magnitude.
Social and medical transition have been exactly the same. I was in denial about being a woman for a long time (and, in fact, part of why I ended up hospitalized for my diabetes was that I was so exhausted from trying to live as a man that I couldn't move myself to care about my health). I had profound imposter syndrome, first about being trans, and then about being a woman. I started my transition, not because I thought I was a woman, but because I knew with 100% certainty that I absolutely WASN'T a man. My being a woman wasn't a decision, it was just a thing that had always been true about me. Transitioning wasn't about trying to be something I wasn't, it was about discovering for myself how hard I'd been working my whole life to try NOT to be a woman. That experience of self discovery isn't a "delusion", it's the exact opposite.
That's the truth that I have lived through, that I myself tried and failed to argue away, deny, and ignore. The TERFs and transphobes, and "gender critical" bullies can froth and rage all they want at me. They can cherry-pick anecdotes, deny the medical science, and conjure whatever fantasies they like. They will never know or understand how it feels to leap off a cliff, build your wings on the way down. They can scream about how my wings are fake, and that I'm not really a bird, but they can't argue with the fact that I'm flying.
