I have absolutely no idea exactly what males mean when they say they "identify as" women - or what females mean when they say they "identify as" men either. I think you're in a far better position to tell me what this means than the other way around. Not because you personally say you "identify as" a woman - I dunno how you describe yourself - but because I think you have a far better understanding than I do of what it's like to be a person who wishes to be the opposite sex, and specifically what it feels like to be someone male who long has sought - and still seeks? - to be perceived as or like a woman in other people's eyes.

Phrases such as "identify as a woman," "she/he identifies as women" or "Lia Thomas identifies as a woman" are not strings of words I have invented, or that I personally use or would ever use. But believers and peddlers of gender ideology have been saying for years that "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" and therefore a male person can be just as much a woman as his mother and grand mothers. And increasingly they say this works the other way around too: "a man is anyone who identifies as a man." (Though I think most of the world is less likely to play along with that fiction than with the fiction that males like Rachel Levine, Char Clymer and Lia Thomas are women just coz they say the magic words "I identify as a woman.")

I personally don't have a gender identity, and the whole idea of people "identifying as" things they/we are not seems ludicrous to me - whether the something they/we are not is a sex, a chronological age, a sexual orientation, a member of political party, a resident of certain country/state/region/city, a practioner of a certain profession or hobby, etc. The nomenclature to "identify as" in a personal sense is totally alien and makes no sense to me.

As I've written here before, the concept of "self identifying" originally referred to colonized, oppressed and marginalized peoples - not to individual persons. Black people in the US came to reject the label "Negro" and instead chose to self-identify as African American or black - and later some would chose to identify as ADOS or POC. In the 1960s and 70s, female adults in workplaces rejected being called "girls" and "working girls" and said we/they wanted be known as women. Similarly, women who worked as administrative assistants aka secretaries, office managers and typists asked not to be referred to by such terms as "my girl," "his girl" or "the office girls" or "the girls." And women attending college/uni said we'd prefer not to be called "co-eds" any more.

But those were group labels. It's only been very recently in history that promoters of gender identity ideology, individual identity politics and the PoMo idea that "people are whatever they say they are" have begun using the concept of self-identity to mean that anyone can pick and choose whatever labels for themselves willy-nilly and to insist that no matter how preposterous and reality-denying some people's claimed self-identities are, they all must be taken seriously, respected, affirmed and seen as "valid" by everyone else in the world. Except, that is, if the person claiming a certain identity is a white woman like Rachel Dolezal.

Using our statements to frame us as males who "identify as" women/girls and then to extrapolate from that framing seems a bit assumptive and misleading.

Then explain what you mean, then. I'm all ears.

BTW, I totally do understand how people can have self-images and body-images in our heads and hearts that stand in stark contrast to who, how and what we actually are in objective reality. When I was a teenager and young woman I saw my own body as fat and ugly when I was actually quite slim and attractive. After I finally came to see my body more realistically, and with self-acceptance and even pride and love, I had a hard time dealing with the marked physical changes that pregnancy and childbirth brought. Now that I am old, I have reached the stage in life where I really don't recognize myself in the mirror any more. In my mind and heart, I still "feel young" in many respects, but my bones and joints don't feel very young - and when I glance in a looking glass, what I see is an old woman who bears little/no resemblance to the woman I once was.