http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1756-i-was-transgender-didnt-know-it-6-weird-realities.html
Righto, good article but there seem to be some misconceptions in the comments section that I'd like to iron out as a trans woman myself (pre-HRT as of now due to parents and living in Texas...), as well as someone very active in the LGBT community.
One of the big questions people seem to have is why trans women equate being girly with being female, when many biological women feel perfectly feminine wearing jeans and boxers and cutting their hair short. This is something hard to grasp when you are not trans, but the long and short of it is that when you are biologically a woman, you are a woman no matter what you do (unless you yourself are trans). You can never wear makeup, always wear boys' clothes, play boys' sports, do traditionally masculine things, and you and society still see you as a girl.
Unfortunately for trans people, this isn't quite true. If you are trans, the world at best sees you as kind of a girl, and at worst sees you as a freak. For a lot of trans women, including myself, being more "girly" or "femme" is a kind of coping mechanism to convince both the world and yourself that you are really a woman, and not just a freak of a man who is pretending to be one. A biological woman doing masculine things is just a tomboy, a trans woman doing masculine things is "being a man again", and thus many trans women stay as far away from anything masculine as humanly possible.
This also does not mean every trans woman thinks that all there is to being a girl is makeup, girly clothes, being femme, etc. A lot of us do experience a fondness for such things in adolescence (I, like the girl in the interview, have a fondness for soft things, prefer sweats over jeans if a skirt is not an option, etc.), and part of that is biological in that our brains tend to be wired differently (don't quote me on that, I haven't read enough of the scientific literature to be an expert on it), and part of it is simply lashing out against a childhood that is filled with constant reminders to be a man, like manly things, act like a man, etc. In a better society, gender roles would not be so prevalent in adolescence and thus transitioning would be easier, but unfortunately that is not the case.
And one final thing, as I saw this mentioned in one comment, trans women, despite many of us being more girly and femme, are not simply defined as "men who like girly things". What separates trans women from men who are simply more feminine and/or girly (which is perfectly alright to be!) is that we are people who feel we are women whether we are dressed in a skirt and high heels with HRT or whether we look like lumberjacks pre-HRT. Just like biological girls, I suppose, we are simply people who feel we are women at all times, but don't always have the outside appearance to match.
I hope I answered some of the bigger questions I saw cropping up in the comments, and if anyone has any more questions, feel free to ask me. Sorry for the big post along with the article, just figured I'd try to clear anything up from the start.