This seems to cause an awful lot of confusion, and it has only gotten worse with the introduction of so many other new words into the vocabulary. In fact, I’ll even say that beyond muddying the waters, these new terms like gender fluid and gender queer have some folks not believing any of it because they seem counterintuitive.
I admit that as a trans person, it is difficult for me to imagine being gender fluid, so it must be really impossible if your world is rock solid around a single gender. Let us not start there though.
Brain Gender
At its root, gender is how we perceive ourselves, that is whether we perceive ourselves as male or female, and that’s basically it. Some people call this brain gender. Resist the urge to pull this into social constructs, they come later. Being transgender, gender fluid, cisgender, etc. are all talking about brain gender.
Because being transgender is about brain gender, it doesn’t really follow that gendered behavior has to follow, although it often does. For many people on what might be called a gender spectrum from trans to cis gender for their biological sex, say from cis-male to trans-female, you’ll often but not always see the trans-female kids identifying and exhibiting typical cis-female behavior and play styles as toddlers and small children. For others, more in the middle, you see what is often termed gender non-conforming behavior, the little boy who wants to try mom’s dresses and such.
Social Gender
Social gender is different and it varies from culture to culture. It encompasses what it means to be male or female in that culture. Being female in the US is different than what it is in Europe than in Afghanistan. An American woman cannot truly understand what life is like for an Afghani sister, although she can come a whole lot closer than any man could.
Gender Transition
For the sake of clarity I’m going to talk about this from my (an MTF) viewpoint, but the opposite (FTM) viewpoint holds just as true. Here though I am not so much talking about facts as my own opinion and conjecture in many places, so do your own reading and decide whether I have it right.
Although we usually say our gender doesn’t change, that we are female all along, I believe we are not exactly female. We are more “not male” or female with a lower case “f”. A potential female. I say this because I think that to have a fully realized female brain gender requires both the wiring, which is mostly there for us, but also the hormones and social experience of being female. In this way I don’t think we are quite right in totally separating social and brain gender.
Starting with transition, the person starts experiencing the world as a woman but is not yet a woman. She starts acting like one, but the emphasis is on acting, not on being. Not on inhabiting. A friend said to me, one who has never met me in person, that when she first met me at the start of my transition I was definitely still a man and when we were talking, maybe a year ago, I was definitely one of the girls. This was about two or three years later.
How could this not be? A lifetime of male behavior, however much undesired, was still very much reinforced and expected. Not I nor any trans woman could possibly turn on a switch and suddenly be a woman. We might have feminine qualities we had hidden, but that is just not the same thing.
I’ve called this a mental transition before, and it is. We go from being a man who is like a woman amongst woman, asking to be accepted, to just being a woman. End of story. It’s the end of the story because we accept ourselves.
I do think at that end stage we are women, perhaps a bit unconventional ones, but women.
A final anecdote
Just because you’ve been good about reading up to here. I live in a very multicultural city. The apartment building I live in, a converted mill building, reflects this with a variety of white, latino and black residents. Lovely people all. I was waiting for the elevator, a wait made longer because one of the elevators was being used for moving, when one of my floor mates, a woman named, R, walked up and we started chatting about whether the elevator was broken, Again. We travelled up on the other and continued.
We were talking about God and I said something like “what ever she (god) wants to do” and R got huge kick out of it and was saying how strong we (women) are”. I like her, she is such a kick. Cute kids too.
Do my neighbors know? I don’t try to let them know, neither to I try overly hard to hide it, but why cause extra trouble. I play peek a boo with the babies in the elevator and say hi to the little ones. It is sweet to be a woman and for this to all be OK, where before I probably couldn’t have done it. Perhaps a penny for your thoughts.
My Gifted Life 
I thought that was a great observation about being a female with a small “t”. One of the arguments you hear from cisgender women who don’t want to accept us is that we don’t have that experience, Indeed. It is not out fault though, it is the social construct. Women and girls get treated much differently than boys, The way we are treated also shapes us as we grow. Myself, I presented as very feminine as a boy and was told by my parents that they would cut my hands off if I didn’t stop walking around limp wristed. They said they weren’t having a sissy boy in their family. So I had to learn to act more like my brothers. For survival! One has to wonder how far along in my womanhood I would be if they had accepted me for who I was.
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