What does feeling a certain gender even mean?

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I don't get it.
Put me in front of the hypothetical magic gender expression swap button and I get stuck there like Buridan's donkey before settling for male out of convenience more than anything. Male requires no readjustment. Male stereotypes are strategically beneficial for what I want others to think of me. Misogyny sure would suck being the target of. Periods sound awful. However, if the world was a less misogynistic place, having a female body might be neat sometimes, I guess. I'm not really attached to the male form per se. There is hesitation, and I feel that says something.
In my nightly dreams, I often inhibit a randomized character. My dreams are very interactive-media-coded. Sometimes I don't get a body at all in my dreams and just experience them as disembodied free cam.
Sometimes I feel like a more neutral, utilitarian form would best reflect who I am at my core, stripped of identity and focused on function.
Maybe I experience gender and just don't realize it. Maybe it exists across from the unusually wide rift that lies between my conscious and subconsciousness.
How do I recognize gender when I experience it? Do I even experience it? What would that look like in practical terms?

This really resonates. That hesitation in front of the "magic button" feels meaningful — like gender isn't absent, just not clearly aligned with any one form. Choosing male out of convenience or strategy rather than identity says a lot, especially when paired with how your dreams shift or even remove embodiment entirely. Maybe gender for you isn’t a fixed point, but something contextual, subconscious, or even utilitarian — more about function than identity. The fact that you're asking these questions so deeply might mean you're experiencing gender in a way that doesn’t fit typical templates, and that’s entirely valid.

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Good news, everyone! I've taught the toaster to feel love!
Planet of the Pudding Brains

As someone said to me once (as my gender presentation floats around androgynous) --> "Eggheadjr, you're just you"

Someone who used to be a friend of mine (before we naturally drifted apart) described growing up trans to me. I'm cisgender.

She said that when she was growing up, there was this sort of looming feeling. A feeling that was vague and frustratingly difficult to pinpoint yet always there. The feeling that something wasn't quite right. One that you were always aware of in some capacity but you didn't quite realise just how much it was in your life until it stops.

I remember when she told me that my outfits had inspired her when she first started transitioning. She told me that my femininity was admirable. That I used to be a source of gender envy for her.

When I was growing up, I used to get picked on for 'not counting as a girl'. So, it was validating to hear that. It...felt like closure that I didn't even know I wanted until it happened.

For me gender is how I relate to my own body, and the expectations society puts on me because of the body I was born with, I was born male, but never really identified with that, I've always felt like my body is just a machine that Im piloting, so I consider myself to be non-binary

Growing up as a tiny cisgender male buying clothes was nearly impossible. Men's stores didn't have anything to sell me and young adult clothing fit oddly.

When I approached my 50s my wife began to worry about me getting laid off--like a number of my co-workers whose services were no longer needed. We watched What Not to Wear and she told me to start looking for small women's tops.
After she passed from ALS I started altering my own clothes and then found out that women's XS tops and bottoms fit my 30A-28-34 figure perfectly! Ten years later I lost ten pounds and it is now 30B-24-34 and I have plenty of women's clothes!

In my opinion, most cis people probably don't "feel a gender". It's more when your gender and bio sex don't align that issues arise. That said, I also believe that non-binary is real and that being agender is real... it's a nuanced thing. To me, agender means that not only "not feeling a gender", but also being totally disconnected from gender.

That said, my gender identity is currently up in the air. I may be genderfluid... I just came out of a period of 6+ months where I identified more on the male side of things, now I'm going back to feeling like I have no gender identity.