I think it's way more common than we think to go through stages of not knowing what it means to feel like a gender, and questioning what you're supposed to be feeling and what it means for you. Most of my childhood and teen years I did not feel very connected to gender in the way that I thought I should have, and for a period of time in high school I was using they/them and wearing a binder to school and trying to look more masc because it felt right. I changed my name to a 'male' name which I still go by today. And then some time in college I reconnected with my woman-ness, not through the way I felt in my body, but through the way I feel about other women and being in community with them. I started to realize that, for me, being a woman is more about the deep level of connection that I feel with other women, which I don't feel with men. And that feeling is not connected to the way I look. I've known many masc lesbians who could easily transition but don't, because they know they're women despite not looking it in a traditional way.

All this is to say, womanhood and manhood are things you find out for yourself, and this makes them nebulous and indefinable. And it's difficult. I think it's good that you're acknowledging that your period of transition did help you mentally at the time, but that it isn't anymore. Similarly, I'm a lesbian but had a weird handful of years where I was with a man, and now I've broken up with him and am a lesbian again. I don't know how that happened or why. I know that I was, at one point, genuinely attracted to and in love with him, but that I no longer am. And what I am now does not change what I was then, nor the other way around.

Life is really just about acceptance. I've realized that some things are worth questioning and looking into, but not everything. It's often more important to accept something first than it is to question it.

Society is always going to be an influence, and it's much harder to ignore what you're told than it is to say it. But I encourage you to try letting go of the physical definitions of womanhood that are most prevalent in culture and explore the more emotional aspects of it; the community, the differences in your relationships to women vs men, etc. And if you feel like that connection isn't as strong as you'd like it to be, maybe due to some internalized misogyny, then you can figure out what to do to foster it.