So, just minutes after posting to this thread, I get the news that one of my younger siblings is going to transition. Quite a coincidence!
Or those on the autistic spectrum are less likely to understand or care about or are even totally blind to the negative signals society sends when you violate gender norms, or the positive signals when you conform. Such a person could easily end up more androgynous in behavior or dress or identification.
Frankly, the whole concept of gender identity baffles me. The way I’ve always understood it was as such; people are either male or female. Which they are is determined by DNA and biology, and in the overwhelming majority of human beings there’s no question as to which they are. Behaviors and stereotypes are irrelevant to that, and a person is not obligated to adhere to any stereotypes about their gender; playing with dolls or wanting to wear a dress doesn’t make you a girl, liking action figures and football doesn’t make you a boy.
It seems like the new trend these days is for people who don’t identify with the stereotypes of their biological gender to insist that they are of some other gender, and to insist on taking a new name stereotypical of that gender and insisting on being referred to with pronouns associated with that gender. I support the right of people to live however they want, but it just feels pseudoscientific to me in that it’s valuing emotions and feelings over that which can be objectively verified. Caitlyn Jenner says she’s female; she has a right to do so, and it doesn’t hurt me or anyone else to call her a her, but it feels somehow dishonest to call someone female when it’s known that they’re biologically male and presented as such for most of their life.
I am male. I never cared for sports or outdoorsmanship or lots of other “manly” activities growing up, and I never felt an obligation to. There was a period in my preteens where I had long hair and was very thin and I looked female to some people, but I never took their comments or assumptions as evidence that there was something wrong with me or that I needed to change my appearance in order to conform to my maleness. If I woke up tomorrow and I were biologically female, it would certainly take some adjusting to, but I wouldn’t feel the need to change the way I behave, dress, or act to conform to anyone’s expectations of what a female is supposed to be.
I guess it’s a matter of a person’s priorities in life - some people identify strongly with a notion of what a man or a woman should be, some people don’t.
I think people who are now in their 20s grew up with a much more rigid cultural model of gender roles than people 10 years older. In particular, children’s toys and clothing became much more gender-specific.
I’m in no way, shape or form on the autistic spectrum, or anywhere near it. I am, however, profoundly clueless around other people, with all the social intelligence of a block of wood.
Maybe that’s part of why I have never felt a strong identification with my gender (which is biologically male) in my life. In fact, if you gave me a choice, I would prefer to keep my own soul, but have it put into a female body. It just seems preferable.
If I was a woman, I would most certainly be tomboyish and “masculine” in many ways. I don’t think you would get me into a dress. But going through life as a man, I’ve also always been overly “emotional” and “unmanly” in many ways. Stereotypically male pursuits have never been my thing. My best friends have always been about half and half guys and girls, and, if anything, I’ve always related the best and most easily to the girls.
Also, on occasion, mostly in my younger days, I have been observed wearing make up. So there’s that. 
I’m very much a heterosexual male, attracted to women. Except when I forget. See my posting history for examples of that. Ideally, I would transplant my brain into a female body and be a lesbian with some slight bisexual tendencies. If you give me a choice for the next life, that’s what I’m picking, easily. But then again, I suppose that is every straight guy’s fantasy, so I feel a bit stupid for saying it.
Anyway. Where was I going with this? Oh, right. Social cluelessness.
I wonder if there’s some correlation between social intelligence and how attached someone is to their gender identity. At least in some cases. Having no social intelligence means not understanding, or caring, how you are “supposed” to behave. I certainly wonder about that for myself.
There’s also strength of character. You may have been unaffected by comments as a preteen but I’d say a majority of children, preteens, and teens are affected and troubled by comments that single them out as “wrong” or “other”. Most people are not as strong as you are in your belief that “you are you”. For all the comments that affected me, comments about my gender identity never got through and I was always firm in my belief that “I am I”. But there are many others with identities that can be shaken more easily, and that seems to be more the status quo than you or I.
In fact, waking up tomorrow and living that life for a short period of time (before changing back) might do a lot to disabuse society of the whole “this is how women are supposed to act” and “this is how men are supposed to act” thing. I can see a lot of bros waking up as women and thinking that they need to change everything they do, based on their perceptions of “women are like this” and “men are like that”, just to finally realize that no, they don’t, and it’s all BS.
I don’t think this has anything to do with gender identification. I’m as girly as can be and I seriously would freak out if I woke up tomorrow with a penis and would go for surgery ASAP. However, I too hate my periods and find them very uncomfortable and annoying. In fact, I don’t know ANY woman who likes their periods, except some goofy crunchy-granola woo types.
The rest of what you said, probably stands.
But we always hear transgendered people say they felt “wrong” when dressed in their biological gender’s clothes. Girls who only want to wear pants and keep their hair short and boys who want to wear dresses and such. The body image seems to only be part of it-- the cultural trappings of gender also plays a significant role. I have to admit that seems rather strange, since the cultural trappings are somewhat arbitrary.
I saw a perfect example of this a few months ago, at a (this may not be surprising) Motorhead concert.
There was a person standing just a little way away from me, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out if it was male or female.
S/he had long hair (this means nothing, particularly at such a concert - I myself have long hair and I’m definitely a man), the clothes were androgynous (again, for a Motorhead concert, not unusual - heavy metal fashions tend to be quite unisex) and his/her body was completely androgynous. Fairly skinny, a boyish face, walked like a girl, maybe a suggestion of breasts, but if there were they were very small.
After two hours standing about ten feet away, I literally couldn’t figure out if I was looking at a male or female.
In the end, I decided it didn’t really matter. Whatever sex s/he was, s/he was clearly quite comfortable with his/her body. I found myself admiring him/her for that.
I do, however, wish there was a gender-neutral pronoun for a singular person. If nothing else, it would make what I’ve just written above easier to read. :rolleyes:
‘It’’ just doesn’t seem right, somehow. 
There have been efforts to introduce new pronouns, but it seems that “singular they” is taking over as the most common solution.
What we don’t have is a convenient one-syllable equivalent for “person”. I’m convinced we need that.
To The OP
Identifying as a gender does not equate to wanting to conform to a gender stereotype. Our own Una Persson identifies as a woman. She also enjoys fencing, motorcycles and has an engineering degree.
In the past, many therapists didn’t understand this. If you wanted to transition to official female status, you had to wear pink dresses and plenty of make up, cook, sew, and be stereotypically feminine.
I identify as male. This works out well cuz I’m XY and have penis. Being a man is VERY important to me. I can think of a long list of body parts I’d rather lose than my penis. If I were to wake up and find it missing, I’d likely commit suicide. But, as this is Septempber, I’m once again sewing my own Halloween costume. I also really enjoy going to antique stores with my mother, holding children, and petting cute lil’ animals. I have no interest in powertools, working on cars, and fishing and hunting strike me as cruel. When I’m in Home Depot, I feel like I’m in alien world. When I was at the fabric store buying the satin I needed for my costume, I felt right at home.
ETA
In my experience, not everybody has a strongly gendered brain or a strong sense of gender. Again, IME it seems to run on a bell curve. So you get people like me on end and folks who have no gender identity on the other.
But if the trappings don’t make you a man or a woman, what does? And what about women who are flat chested or don’t have big hips/butt–are they less womanly?
For me, it’s not so much that I don’t feel any association with my gender. It’s more that it’s mostly learned. I wouldn’t want to be a man because I’ve spent about three decades learning to be female, putting on that persona. It would be a lot of work to suddenly be a guy, but if I had been born that way, I’d probably have learned to be male.
The stria terminalis AFAIK. It’s a bit of brain that seems to be responsible for gender identity.
A human with XX chromosomes, ovaries, uterus vagina etc with a male stria terminalis will feel like and identify as a man.
The question that raises, of course, is; what is “a man”? What are the defining charicteristics that men possess which differentiate them from other human beings that are not men?
As a female, the idea that my gender is inherently inferior did not sit well with me as a child. Feeling “female” to me is basically about coming to terms with the societal and biological handicaps associated with “femaleness”: being treated as a non-person of sorts, being forced to undergo extreme physical pain to have children, having to prove myself and try harder, being told I should fear for my safety, etc.
Thinking I should have different genitalia is is like thinking I should have wings. Why waste time lamenting my unfortunate biology? Life is unfair and absurd.
I totally relate to the gender-indifferent people in this thread. I can’t truly imagine what it means to “feel like” a woman because it seems to me that so many aspects of gender are based on artificial social constructs and cultural conditioning rather than innate.
I definitely do believe that there is probably an organic, biological aspect to how our brain influences our perception of ourselves that is probably altered in a transgender person and contributes to why transgender people are so distressed, but I suspect that as we develop a better understanding of the brain we will probably come to realize that it was overly simplistic to think of it as “being born the wrong gender”.
I am a biological female who is fine with being female. However, I believe that most of my “feminine” traits are the result of a lifetime of social conditioning, rather than something innate that drew me to act that way or like those things. I never went through a “boys have cooties” phase - even as a kid, I had friends who were boys and as an adult I have male platonic friends that are just as close or closer to me than female friends are.
I truly do feel that if I were to wake up male tomorrow, I would be able to adapt to it. It would probably be an adjustment to suddenly no longer have the social indoctrination “You are female, and this is how you are expected to behave because you are female” after a lifetime of hearing those messages. It might be strange to suddenly have to pay attention to all the little unwritten social rules of “Being Male” when it never mattered before. However, it seems to me that ultimately there are pros and cons with both genders. Neither one seems inherently easier or more natural to me.
I think it is hard to notice “feeling male” or “feeling female” when that feeling accords with every other commonly applied criterion. Someone who is described as male, and seen by others as male, gets their sexual orientation described as though they are male, and has a penis and chest hair and all the rest, is going to feel it very sharply if their subjective experience is of being a woman, but if they feel male it may not even register.
Which is not to say there aren’t cis men who explicitly feel male and cis women who explicitly feel female, but with cis being the default to such a degree that merely using the term will inevitably start a fight even in a place dedicated to fighting ignorance, such people are pretty thin on the ground compared to trans people who have that awareness.
Hey, I take time out to lament unfortunate weather, unfortunate selection of mustard varieties at my local store, and unfortunate sports results. Unfortunate genitalia is most definitely on my list of things that I consider bitch-worthy.
They don’t. You really get the full range. There are people who transition into butch women, people who transition into effeminate guys, and people who transition into an androgynous look that may be exactly the same as before. We don’t tend to get a lot of glossy photo spreads on that, because it doesn’t sell as well as “lumberjack transforms into buxom lingerie model”. But they are there.
That said, people do a lot of playing around with gender presentation as they grow up. We all probably have some embarrassing photos from points in our adolescence where we played with how stereotypically masculine or feminine we want to look (ever seen a 12 year old put on their own make-up?). Eventually, through years of feedback and experimentation, we figure out something that works for us.
Transgender people missed that time period, so they end up having to do a lot of that hit-or-miss experimentation later on.
Another factor is safety. Not “passing” can lead to being beat up or worse. It may feel safer to dress in a way that is unmistakably feminine. Dressing androgynously is a different thing for a person who is clearly the gender they are using the bathroom of than for someone who isn’t visually immediately identifiable as that gender.
The weather will change, you can go elsewhere for mustard, and another game will be played. Unfortunate genitalia are a much more tedious problem.