While I can understand where you're coming from, look at what you're saying is making you think this kid of "female":
...weight can't just magically be willed away, so if he's still very much pre-transition, and by proxy pre-HRT, then there's really only so much he can do.
...not everybody has a luxurious budget to buy all new clothes with, and some people have certain items in their personal wardrobes for all sorts of reasons.
...if this is something that he's only recently realised he needs to do for himself, then (especially depending on his age) he's probably had years of learning what mannerisms and appearances will make life easiest, especially if he's only been attracted to men. These aren't things that one can just magically unlearn.
It's really hard for me to *not* put myself in this kid's shoes. I was in a similar position myself for *years* -- I say "similar" because all of my long-terms boyfriends (now exes) all claimed that they loved how "boyish" my personality was, and even in high-school, all of my friends commented on this "gay punk boy in a female body" thing I had going on, so obviously I neglected to adopt most female social mannerisms (though I quickly learned that, having tits the size of my head, when all else failed, I could cry and get my way), but I grew up with a mother who was ex-theatre and a father raising me on Broadway musicals so I've always loved make-up and dressing up and, especially pre-transition, have always had a wide range of outfits for various occasions -- even some dresses. I've always felt longer hair flattered my face shape better (though it's been years since it's come past my shoulders). And when I had tits the size of my head? Forget binding, it could have killed me, and forget working off the hourglass figure, since walking for more than a few minutes at a time threw my back out and even laying down on my back for a few seconds weighed so heavily on my chest I felt suffocated. Furthermore, when i lived in Los Angeles some years ago, I briefly worked as an adult model and a Pro Domme -- it was easy work for me, and hey, it often involved my life-long loves of make-up and dressing-up; it was all just "theatre" to me, both then and now. Believe me, I'm finding it very hard *not* to put myself in this kid's shoes -- even the TS guys at my local group couldn't stand me because I'm so poor that it took me three years to get things in motion.
Yeah, I look a lot better now than I did then -- and suddenly some of those guys who *hated me* five years ago now think I'm "cool people", but the end result is that I went through so many years of them, both to my face and behind my back, laughing, bad-mouthing, calling me "she" (both intentionally and sometimes not -- and oh, boy, did they ever have some choice phraseology when my past work came up in convo once), and so forth that honestly? I can't stand them -- out of the TS guys at the local group, the only one who was ever consistently decent to me, even defended me when I wasn't there, is the guy who ran the group, and incidentally, he's the only one I care for.
Believe me, my personal anecdotes aside, I can see both sides of this because I really do believe that all human beings have some form of a soul that those around us can pick up on -- and I've never met this guy, so all I have is what you're saying here to go by. And I'm far from innocent of being suspicious of people who claim to be somehow TS/TG but come off as very cisgendered, even if only "in spirit". But that said, what you've listed off as reasons for having this issue with this kid's "vibe", all I'm seeing is stereotyping based on presentation which could be the result of nothing more than how he's learned to cope with life this far. If pheromone has anything to do with this, I have no idea, but human beings don't have a strong enough sense of smell to detect actual pheromone (it's completely different from the musk of sweat), at least not in typical quantities on somebody who bathes even every two or three days.
