For being tragender writ large, it doesn’t make sense to call it inherent for the same reason being cisgender isn’t inherent,

Except the preponderance of evidence is that it is inherent and probabilistically related to prenatal hormone levels during certain stages of neurological development. There was a meta study* a few years back that compiled a bunch of research on things like congenital adrenal hyperplasia (massively more likely to result in a male identity than the baseline rate of trans masc identities in the general population, although still a minority of all individuals with CAH), other hormone-related congenital conditions (some caused massive increases in the incidence of trans identities, although still a minority of the individuals in the studies), XY individuals with cloacal exstrophy who were AFAB due to missing genitals who were raised female (extremely high incidence of male identities, nearly half the subjects in the study), and prenatal exposure to diethylstilbestrol (which showed nearly a 30% rate of female identities in AMAB individuals with confirmed or suspected prenatal exposure to DES) which found the existing literature is enough to conclude that there is something that's inherent and fixed in the brain.

And if it wasn't, then a lot of the medical side of transitioning wouldn't work. HRT would cause dysphoria instead of alleviating it, GRS would result in a mismatch with the brain's map of the body instead of aligning the body with that map as it does. If there were not a fixed and inherent quality in the individual then coercion and cishet indoctrination would work instead of being the deadly torture that they are. The simple fact that transitioning works both socially and medically is extremely strong evidence for the existence of some form of innate gender identity.

Now, obviously, I think whatever that construct in the brain is has to be very plastic and adaptable because of how it slots people into boxes that can be very wildly different across cultures and it is my personal theory that it's a wide range of constructs intermingled with other things and serves to influence how socialization is taken in, how self-image is developed based on cultural aesthetics and norms, etc along with more directly medical things like the hormones that the brain expects or how the brain builds a map of the body. I would further say that I believe these constructs can be independent of one another so individuals can end up with a variable mix that doesn't neatly fit into the larger boxes, and that perhaps some aren't even fully fixed at all so that there can be a degree of ongoing variance that moves someone's identity around.

And the dumbest thing is that despite all this, I also believe in gender abolition from a liberationist standpoint, that as far as it is possible to do so there should be a comprehensive decoupling of gender from aesthetics and roles, with the understanding that people are still going to filter socialization in a gendered way to some extent, still form their self-image in line with their gender, still require specific hormone balances to feel ok, etc.

* Evidence Supporting the Biologic Nature of Gender Identity; Aruna Saraswat, MD; Jamie D. Weinand, BA, BS; Joshua D. Safer, MD; Endocr Pract. 2015;21(2):199-204.

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it’s not like anyone, cis or trans, is ontologically a man or woman.

I completely, 100% have to disagree. I am very definitely ontologically a woman. It is just that Woman is neither a category of biology (that would be "female") nor a social role (that would be "feminine"), it is rather an internal, psychological category relating to our sense of self. It is the frame of reference through which we perceive the entire rest of our gender experience, the relationship to our bodies, the gendered relationships to other human beings, our gender performance, the relation between our behavior and gendered expectations ("do i like this because i'm a man or do i like it in spite of being a girl?"), the framing of our sexual orientation ("am i a straight man or a lesbian woman?") and so on.

Reducing gender to a two-fold model that just knows biological sex and gender as a social construct does not explain my experience at all, nor does it explain the experience of a majority of other trans people. It is beyond discussion to me that it is empirically non-viable. Focussing too much on a fleeting, socially constructed, idealist concept like gender performance is indeed a red herring when exploring one's gender, just as it is a mistake to get hung up on someting that can be changed just by hitting the right hormonal switches at the right moments like biology. To make sense of our lifes, especially that it is to us undeniably self-evident that we have never been our assigned gender at birth even when we supressed it and performed in a different gender role, in a body mismatched with our self, only makes sense when you treat woman or man or enbie as a seperate, internal category, everybody's "true self" so to speak. Otherwise, if i had a male body for most of my life and performed as a boy for most of my life, which i had and which i did, how could i always have been trans? I would have started being trans when my egg cracked, but not before, because under a two-dimensional biological + social model, 100% of the dimensions of my gender experience would have been manly. But they weren't. Neither my body nor my role as a boy ever fit me. Nothing in my life ever made sense, it was all a disparate jumble of struggling to fit a mold not made for me - and once i realised "oh, i'm just trans", all of that stopped. It just turned to dust. It could not offer the slightest resistance. Everything made sense by simply fitting in that missing puzzle piece that was my gender identity. This is a quite common experience for trans people who do not fall in the "i've always known, i refused to wear pants when i was just three years old and then i told mom it's a mistake by god that i have a weenie" category - lots of trans people do see their true self as early as that, lots of others don't and instead only come out later in life, but evidence clearly shows we're all equally valid.

Not feeling that you even have a gender identity is ofc still possible - it is a logical conclusion for agender people where gender identity may just be a blank, it may also be a privilege of cis people who never had to think about this issue too hard because their gender identity, social gender role and biological sex are all more or less completely aligned from the start, or it may be a fairly typical train of thought for eggs who through their denial and repression lack a connection with their gender identity (the latter was me for a large part of my life).

But if you want to explain everybody's gender experience - and a viable gender theory should do exactly that - you need more than the two dimensions of biology and social role. What i've outlined here is based on Leslie Feinberg's model, i've also seen five-fold models. But regardless of what you use, two-fold is always too simplistic, it is only an intermediary step up from bio-reductionist explanations like "gender is just your chromosomes".