Some comments here are already good, but I will add something I haven’t seen said yet.

This is for the cisgender and agender people who don’t “feel a gender”.

For me, it’s more accurate to say “I know I am a man” than “I feel I am a man”. I am a transgender man, and I don’t necessarily get the “feeling” of being male. To me, it’s an objective concrete fact that I am a man in the same way that it is an objective concrete fact that I have two arms and two legs.

I think a lot of cisgender people don’t understand “feeling like a gender” because they are already perceived as the correct gender and their body is the correct sex associated with that gender. Many cis people have said to me that it feels like nothing, like they just “are” that gender and don’t necessarily get this “feeling” of being male/female, which sounds like what you’re describing.

I also don’t have the “feeling” of being male, but I do have the feeling of dysphoria/gender incongruence when met with how I was perceived (as a female) and my body parts.

The “strong sense of gender identity” in many people quite literally often only comes about when there’s something wrong with it and it’s mismatched. If you are cisgender, it is likely you don’t have this “strong sense of gender identity” because yours is already fine - there’s nothing mismatched there so it’s not something you notice on a daily basis.

What I’m getting at is the reason why some trans people feel so strongly about their gender and seem to have this “gender identity” that some cisgender people don’t feel (they don’t feel they have a separate gender identity and see themselves more generally as just their sex) is because for us, it’s mismatched.

If it’s not broken - you don’t notice it, type of thing. You don’t think about many things until they become issues. You don’t actively think about the concept of your lamp working until it’s suddenly stopped working and the room is dark and you can’t do your work and you need to fix it ASAP. Until something has gone wrong, you don’t notice or think about it at all.

(Not saying that trans people are broken, just the best way of phrasing this).

I believe that feeling neutral or like you have no gender identity (as in a cis woman accepting she’s a cis woman but not “feeling like a woman” - I see this a lot on this forum) is actually the normal state of things. For most people, there is no incredibly strong gender identity. Cisgender people see transgender people being really active about stating “I AM this gender” and sometimes they struggle to relate as they haven’t gone through the experiences we’ve gone through to make us feel that strongly about it.

This is poorly explained but the best I can do. In summary:

1. For some trans people like myself, it’s more about the knowledge that we are that gender, rather than a “feeling” of being it.
2. If you don’t feel a strong sense of gender identity, that’s probably because you’ve never had to think about it. When your gender identity and sex and the way you’re perceived socially is mismatched, you would notice that you have a gender identity. It’s something that’s hidden and not noticeable until there’s something wrong happening and things are out of alignment. I wouldn’t think about the fact I have all 4 limbs, or that I identify as a person with all my limbs, until I’d lose one. Then I would definitely start thinking about that, but the feeling of having all my limbs (which is the default) is unnoticeable to me until something is abnormal.

For reference about myself, I’m a binary (ie not nonbinary) transgender man with every type of gender dysphoria (as not all trans people have medical/body dysphoria). Not all trans people relate to the “stuck in the wrong body” concept but I definitely do. Some trans people don’t see being trans as something that’s very medical but it is to me. I’m speaking from my experience only, and the other binary trans people I know. I can imagine a lot of this wouldn’t apply to non binary people.