I suspect none of us really know what it’s like to “feel” like a woman or a man. We only know what it’s like to feel “like ourselves” and we use social cues as to whether what we are is apparently male or female, based on our bodies and presentation.

I’m cis, but I’ve no idea what gender is supposed to feel like. I don’t have a little voice telling me I’m a woman. Or a man. I just feel like me. But I identify as a woman because I am fine with people seeing me as such and recognising me as such. And I was taught as a kid that “this feeling of being yourself is what being a girl feels like” and I can’t dispute it because I don’t have anything to compare it with, as I can never inhabit someone else’s subjectivity.

But I don’t have this innate sense of “womanhood” or if I did, I wouldn’t know how to distinguish it from simply what it feels like to be ME. The individual who is me, who happens to be inside this body and to have grown up with it.

For all I know what I feel like is nothing like what other women associate with their gender.