Personal viewpoint, others are available.
Like many girls, I spent a lot of my adolescence being told (and feeling) that being a girl was a bit crap. Sexism was the oppressor, and girls were pushed down by it. But there was a solution: don't be like a girl.
Being a tomboy is more endearing than being a girly girl. That's soppy. A girl can wear the trousers. A girl can do science and maths. A girl can be the boss. A girl can be called Bob and be an actor; feminine endings are belittling.
Now the bits about being able to do science and maths were, of course, entirely positive; but some of the rest of the narrative could at least be interpreted to mean that the best way of being a girl was to be a quasi-boy. Sex, unfortunately, got in the way of this, if you fancied men: you wanted, naturally, to ingratiate yourself with boys, so you fell in with their plans. I sat in dingy student rooms listening to male voices droning on and thought I was low in the hierarchy because I was Smiths rather than because I was female. I slept with those that'd have me. I didn't entirely succeed at this, but I tried to be A Good Chapess. A Ladette. What Gillian Flynn would later describe as a Cool Girl. Complaining about sexism would've been so passe; weren't we all mates together? (Perhaps the only girls that didn't fall for that shite were lesbians, but I didn't know any at the time, so far as I knew.)
I did not complain about my skinny little boobless slightly-wonky very spotty body, because worrying about "beauty" is so girly. I simply felt the pain of not being what I thought I ought to be.
Years passed. I always said I wasn't going to have kids, partly because I'd seen my highly-educated friends and family apparently ditch all their aspirations and resign themselves to wiping arses and singing nursery rhymes. How could they? Weren't they letting the side down? I wasn't. I had a job, like grown-ups do. I was bloody miserable, but at least I was playing the game.
And then at the age of 41, as a colleague put it - "I grew a human."
That skinny little frame burgeoned, blossomed, it formed and nurtured another person. It twisted and squeezed and spat him forth, perfect and damp as a conker from its shell. It fed him. He lived upon my breast. I was Mother Earth. And I was welcomed into the warm and slightly sticky embrace of the cabal of mothers.
I never wished I was a boy: a certain honesty forced me to admit that a male Smiths would not be a Smiths at all. And to be honest, I was always pretty repelled by the offshoot of feminism which tries to make out that being born female is nothing but ill luck, condemning its victims to Women's Problems. I didn't see why being a woman should be all that much worse than being a man.
But only since my son was born have I really come to believe that being a woman isn't just tolerable, but amazing. And that applies to all women, mothers or not. We are amazing. Human beings with the wit and wisdom of men, but far, far less of their aggression and silly who-can-piss-the-highest competitiveness. We bring people together. We collaborate and give and are not ashamed to love. And some of us grow humans.. A woman is not just a man in a dress. She's a hell of a lot better than that.
I still like men, by the way. I still like anyone who's good crack, including my friend Lizzie, the artist formerly known as Steve. But I'm just an awful lot prouder of not being one.