Must it though?

What if all children are naturally inclined to "feel like boys", whatever that means. But then society dictates that some are "girls" and are put in dresses, hair plaited, and told to behave a certain way? Why wouldn't they feel uncomfortable with their assigned gender role, regardless of what's coming for them in puberty?

Yeah, we treat girls and boys drastically differently from birth, mostly without noticing, and then people say it must be hardcoded that they act so differently. It's a puzzler to me. I hated being forced to wear dresses when I was little, too. They were scratchy uncomfortable and it made it hard to run around and play because I had to worry about whether people could see my underwear. I had to sit in a ladylike way with my legs closed, for the same reason. So given that I was regularly forced to wear a dress, which also forced me to sit a certain way, involve myself less in active play, get used to wearing uncomfortable things because they looked nice, how can anyone think that the fact I lean more towards these feminine habits now, compared to someone who was not forced to do these things, is a natural outgrowth from my biology? To me that seems to have been pretty obviously trained into me. Even in cases where I wasn't explicitly forced to adopt feminine habits by my parents, there is a lot of lateral socialization that goes on between kids, who have also received gendered messages from parents, media, society and other kids. Boys often didn't want to let girls play the boy games with them, so if you wanted to make friends as a girl, you had better be up for playing the girl games.

https://books.google.ca/books?id=bEycBQAAQBAJ&pg=PT161&lpg=P...

The indoctrination starts young, and it sucks. And the majority of role models in society reinforce it. People in general seem to lack the self awareness to realize what's going on and chalk it up to the natural way of things.

That is a provocative thought.

But it were the case—if every young (apparent) girl felt the same unease about their gender—one would assume that the people in the town would have already acknowledged that. They seem quite comfortable discussing gender.

On the other hand, if there was a clear way to distinguish the guevedoces from the "permanent" girls before puberty, then they would presumably raise them as boys, not girls, because they would know that the penis is going to eventually come in. But their descriptions of discomfort with girlhood don't sound that much different than the ones I had, and so the parents can't tell them apart from any other persistent tomboy. Traditional girlhood is not a positive experience, it is designed to shape children for a subservient adult role. It is not strange or unusual to hate it and it's not evidence that someone is secretly a boy.

This is exactly the point I wanted to make and was the anecdote I was hoping someone would share.

Funny how once their penises start growing they're accepted for the boyishness, but the "real" girls are stuck in their shitty gender role, and few people note the hypocrisy.

plenty of cultures past and present where men wear dress like clothing and have plaited hair.