I still don't understand why these creeps are so obsessed with "seeing themselves" in literally everything.

To use pop psychology, its likely because they lack empathy. They cannot understand other people exist and have emotions, and especially cannot connect with someone on those emotions without making it about themselves.

So instead, they need characters to "be like them" before they can feel anything for them, because the superficial aspects are something they do understand. The struggles need to mirror thiers, so they can then dump their problems and emotions into the character and force them to fit into the box of being "literally them."

To give trannies one piece of credit, that's very much a woman thing to do. Its one of the baselines of women's understandings of the world and their selfishness. However, while it comes naturally to women, with the MTFs is because their kind is riddled with autism and makes these things completely foreign to them.