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I had a somewhat similar experience, though probably not quite so strong. The emotional reasoning chain went something like [I like her] leads to [I admire her] leads to [I want to be like her], the last of which bleeds through into all aspects of being similar to someone, including physical aspects, rather than sensibly stopping at things like "I want to be charismatic and funny" and "I want to be graceful and competent." So I wouldn't agree that my "desire to possess" bled into a "desire to be", rather I had a perfectly reasonable "desire to be" which just bled outwards a little bit.
I think actually the phenomenon you are describing is more common in reverse. People notice positive qualities in their same-gendered friends, and rather than interpreting that as desire-to-be they interpret that as homosexual desire-to-possess.
I was never really at risk of transitioning at all for many reasons, but perhaps the most relevant to this discussion is just that I had (and still have) much bigger priorities than my own comfort. There are things which are both more fun to think about and more important, so they naturally pushed any disordered admiration entirely to the wayside.
That's an interesting thought about desires bleeding in the other direction. One thinks of the phenomena of hero-worship, or parasocial relationships, which might have something of that in them? I'm not sure about that being a common source of homosexual feeling -- my sense is that there's something else going on, there, at least in the central case. I'll try not to speculate about that, though; I am in agreement with C.S. Lewis here: "I have a reluctance to say much about temptations to which I myself am not exposed."
I'm definitely in agreement that having bigger priorities makes things less of a big deal. I don't think that's always sufficient, though; people can have sincere bigger priorities and still be tormented by contradictory desires (and even act on them, c.f. St. Paul: "For the good that I will to do, that I do not do, but the evil that I will not to do, that I practice.") for a long time.
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