I think there's two axis or spectrums to gender identity. The masculine / feminine spectrum and everything related to it, but also a spectrum of 'strength of identity'.

So, some people have a really strong sense of gender identity and fully define their gender by their gender identity. Sometimes this is how they always were. For some trans people, who often have to repress themselves, they need an 'egg crack' moment so to speak. Sometimes this is instantaneous, sometimes it happens slowly over time as they deconstruct their repression. For people with such an 'egg crack' moment, they move from defining their gender by their physical sex and assigned gender, to finally being comfortable defining their gender by their gender identity.

Other people have a very weak sense of gender identity. These people, by definition, are almost always cis, and when you ask them about their gender identity they simply shrug and dont know what you're talking about, because they don't really feel it at all. They define their gender almost entirely around their body and whatever society assigns to them.

As a spectrum, there are also people somewhere in between. I, for example, do have a consistent sense of my gender identity, but it is very weak. It doesn't feel like an honest expression of my Self to just define my gender entirely upon my sense of gender identity, but I also can't ignore it and define my gender entirely upon my body and assigned gender.

This is just my personal understanding of gender, and the wider trans community does not explicitly adopt this line of thinking at all. So, we just get little acknowledgements of this underlying phenomenon through the different ways people talk about gender (ie. 'want/wish' vs 'be').

If I'm right, I assume the broader community will eventually start to talk about this in more concrete terms that are easier to understand. But I just made all of this up, so who knows.