I might be a woman internally, but I don't really experience it that way. I feel like a man, I'm a man in my dreams, and I have habituated thinking of myself as a man for so long that it's very hard to think of myself as anything but a man.

While even now I still question the validity of my gender identity as female, I think the evidence that my gender identity is female is pretty strong, e.g. I'm not sure a cis man would feel so comfortable and happy with the hormones and body I have now, for example, let alone pursue it and sacrifice so much to make it happen. On the flip side, a cis man would probably not have such severe mental health symptoms appear when male levels of testosterone are maintained (and see those go away when the testosterone is sufficiently suppressed), let alone have the kinds of experiences I had growing up (like consistently being drawn to and wearing women's clothes since my earliest memories well through adulthood).

So if I'm a woman internally, I have all these experiences that looking back might make sense as the experiences of a young women - e.g. when I was 15 my leg hair started to come in thick and it made me feel nauseous and I hated the hair, so I would secretly steal a razor and use it to shave my legs so my family wouldn't know I had leg hair (this was despite the social pressures to masculinize and my own fear and explicit awareness that I needed to be more masculine because my body was very delayed or weak in its male puberty compared to peers, leading to being bullied).

Other examples: when I first learned of eunuchs in the context of a fictional feminist sci-fi story where eunuchs were allowed to live in a city of women, I immediately felt a strong certainty I wanted to be a eunuch. I wanted to be accepted as "one of the girls". I dreamed of living with other women in a kind of platonic sisterhood situation. I envied the relationship my sisters had with one another.

To get more to your question: I also came to feel alienated from men, and that alienation led me to see them as dysfunctional and weird, and I strongly preferred to make and have female friends. I just didn't really click with men or boys and didn't like being friends with them. Female friends were considerate, they were more likely to be interesting conversational partners, they didn't engage in violence against me, and in general they had more similar interests. Boys on the other hand were often cruel, even my good male friends would leave my room trashed after staying the night, and boys were the only people whipping me with chains, shooting me with bb guns, punching me in my genitals (these were all done by genuine friends, as friendly behavior), but boys were also the only ones who were threatening and bullying me - spitting on me, verbally abusing me, etc.

So, these are experiences that might make sense as a female trapped in a male social role and body - but I didn't know that, and additionally I needed to reject that kind of explanation, so instead I internalized that my feelings were typical for any man to feel, and particularly that the way I felt about men was a way any man might or should feel.

Basically, any man would feel alienated and discomfort around other men because they are threatening, right? Any man would want to be friends with women, since women are objectively better friends, right? I rationalized the differences as general in ways that felt objective and not really about my specific gender - I ignored the ways that I was unusual and that other boys seemed to enjoy rough-housing and their violent games, instead preferring to think it was a matter of self-awareness or morality that made that difference (because I didn't resort to crude violence for fun, I felt superior - and I thought any boy or man should be like me, and I thought that was tantamount to seeking to embody feminine norms).

Instead of recognizing that I'm probably a trans woman because I just wanted to be one of the girls, instead I came to rationalize my view of boys and men as violent, inconsiderate, dumb, and thrill-seeking as inherently wrong. I started to blame and hate gender itself, and I hated especially the male gender and being associated with men at all.

But I rationalized my feelings in a way that eliminated the personal aspects and generalized it so I wouldn't have to confront that the way I felt wasn't based on something like morality but was instead rooted in gender dysphoria. In reality, there are plenty of good men and boys, and transitioning actually helped me see how misguided my gender abolitionism and misandry were.

The generalizations I made to repress my awareness of my dysphoria were not as objective as I thought they were. It's only in hindsight that I have this awareness, though - at the time my mindset was captive to the adaptive rationalizations I made. To be honest, it was unthinkable that I was a woman or that I should transition to be a woman. It even seemed disrespectful to me, that because women were so sacred to me, it would be profane for me to pretend to be one.

Of course that was before I learned about the science of how gender identity forms, about the way gender dysphoria can look, and about the robust empirical evidence proving that medical and social transition significantly improves mental and physical health for trans people.

I think even if I knew all of those things I still wouldn't have transitioned, I actually wasn't open to the idea until after I was hit by a car (like maybe the third major ER visit?) and my spouse was hitting a breaking point with how willing I was to die (or get as close to it as I could). So, it was actually out of a sense of responsibility to the people I care about in my life that I eventually transitioned, since it seemed like a plausible explanation for why my mental health was so bad and why I was such a suicidal burden of a human being - and voila, the guess was right, the first week of estrogen was the first time I felt life-affirming and didn't even have passive suicidal ideation since I think sometime around 11 - 13 years old. I had actually forgotten what it felt like.