Cat girls aren’t real?

So I was talking to my TA after class about anime for a minute. He was saying his favorite was “Gundam Wing”, which he watched in college, and I said I don’t really like mecha anime, which I also told him I watched in college. He was saying that mecha anime was a medium to tell a story, and that I shouldn’t dismiss the genre cause it’s all the same. I tend to like moe type anime more, so I said sometimes I just want to dumb down and watch cute cat girls be cute, and he laughed and said that the cat girls are just people drawing fictional characters that way so you can imagine it’s real. I told him that the catgirls aren’t real, and he laughed again and said that they’re just a way of fantasizing what it’s like to keep an animal as a pet. I had to play it cool cause I’m an undergraduate and he’s my teaching assistant, but this just sounds like someone who lived under a rock for the entirety of the 21st century. I told him that the catgirls aren’t real, and he told me that they’re just an animate concept. He’s gotta be trolling me, right?