But you don't keep your proportions. Tall people aren't generally wider compared to short people, not in proportion to the height difference. There are some ratios that stay similar, like torso length, leg length and arm length, but even people who are the same height can have different proportions. I expect it'd be easier for someone who is transported into another body to adjust, compared to if they suddenly lost a few cm of length in their shins. But.
Humans aren't precision machines, but we've spent a LOT of hours building, refining, adjusting and reinforcing the maps of how our bodies should work. I think even a small change to someone who's not used to this being a thing that can change, would be pretty significant. I can adjust between wearing glasses and not wearing glasses pretty easily, but if someone with perfect vision were to wear my glasses they'd probably get a headache. And brains tend to get Very Upset when the senses contradict things they Trust to be True.
Maybe people might be able to adjust over time. Prosthetic legs are a good counter example to how I imagine someone would react to having a changed height. Apparently there's people with double amputations who intentionally mess around with the lenght of their prosthetics. But then again, most prosthetics have to be fitted by a professional, so. Mixed results?
I was leaning a bit hard on the "misaligned map as model for physical dysphoria" thing. Because we do know that people don't just grow out of physical dysphoria. Some learn to live with it, in the way people learn to live with chronic pain. But. You can't cure physical dysphoria brain-side. People have tried. HRT and gender affirming surgeries have significantly better outcomes.
I'm not 100% on if this is the best explanation but. What if, every day of your life, people got your name wrong. People got your name wrong, looked at you and saw someone else, someone they insist is you. Someone who is fundamentally different from who you know yourself to be. They treat you like you're someone else. They've always treated you like you're someone else. They treat other people the way you'd expect to be treated, but never you. Because they insist you are not you. Eventually you sit people you love down, explain how you're feeling and who you are, not the person they think they see. And they see you. And they start to treat you like you. It feels great, because you're you and now other people can see that too! All this time you've felt like the people around you didn't see you for who you were, you were right! And now that's fixed!
But then you go outside and random strangers only see the person you're not. So you'll have to take steps to make sure that, when they see you, they notice you. Not the person you're not.
It ran from the late 1980's to mid 1990's, I can give it the benefit of understanding it's a product of its time. Though the sexual harrassment -> retaliatory violence gags are a bit. Uh. I think EGS explained/recontextualised it pretty well.
