Gender Dysphoria

A biologically female friend of mine has always had trouble identifying as a woman, but she did not identify entirely as a man, either. She has always been feeling something in between, too masculine to be a woman yet too feminine to become a man entirely, and it was not until recently that she looked on the internet and found the gender identification of "androgyne" before she realized that she was not alone in her gender non-normativeness. She now identifies as female-to-androgyne transgendered, though has no plans to take hormones to change her physical sex or appearance. I've also met some others who experience gender dysphoria, including MtF and FtM transgender individuals.

There was also a case decades ago in which a boy's penis was destroyed during a circumcision procedure, and the doctors made the decision to perform sex reassignment surgery on him, forcing him to take female hormones for the rest of his life and instructing his parents to raise him as a girl. This became a great source of trauma for him, and after finding out the truth about himself, he went back to living his life as a man before eventually committing suicide in his 40s.

What is gender, and by extension, gender dysphoria, beyond their dictionary and medical definitions? What does it feel like to be one sex yet desire to be another? I wish I had answers to these questions, because they would help me a lot in understanding what my friend has been going through. It seems easier to recognize oneself as identifying as the opposite gender, because society has clearly defined definition for what each gender is, and it seems identification has to do with mentally fitting these definitions. But what is it that creates gender identity? It seems socialization and biology are not quite enough to determine some people's identifications. My friend mentioned in the first paragraph has higher than average levels of testosterone compared to most other women, but she was still raised as a woman. Is there, then, some other intangible measure of identity that somehow separates humanity down a line? According to most discussions we have had in our classes, this dichotomy does not exist naturally, but why is it that some people can identify as "the opposite," then?