As I understand it, the concept of embodiment seeks to move away from the Cartesian mind-body dualism, which posits that our minds and our physical bodies are distinct entities, and towards the idea that we are our bodies. We experience, know, and perceive the world through our bodies, and in return we are experienced and perceived by others through the lens of our bodies. An important factor in our body experience and the way our bodies are perceived is gender. Do I have a gender, or am I my gender? Do I have a body, or am I my body?
I often look back on my childhood to try and see if there were any ‘signs’ that I was queer. There are some moments that I remember, but they are rare and not terribly insightful or self-explanatory: When an “About Me” project had me name the color of my soul, I wrote that it was mostly camouflage with a tiny bit of sparkly pink, because I liked girly things sometimes. There was the one Crazy Hair Day in fourth grade where I tucked all my hair under a cap and was mistaken for a boy, but I don’t remember my reaction to that. In fifth grade, when all the girls in my class met up in the bathroom and made a ranking of boys on the stall wall (what were they ranking??), I wasn’t included in the meeting. I did later look at the list and relay it back to the boys though, as a sort of gender spy.
I guess I didn’t have a strong gender identity as a kid, which allowed me to avoid internalizing the womanly self-doubt and not-taking-up-space-ness we’ve read about. My perception of the world has been shaped by my disinterest for what people think I should be. There’s definitely a conflict there, between my not caring what others think about me and my simultaneous desire to be seen as not a girl.
When, in the past, my mother responded to my dysphoria and desire to transition with “Why can’t you just be ((name))?”, she did so with the assumption that I could separate how I felt from the reality of my body. It is possible to compartmentalize my dysphoria for limited amounts of time, but I can’t ignore it completely. I am just me, but that me happens to be different from how I came out of the womb. I have to live in and with and as this body for the rest of my life, so I’m making it mine!
Unruly Bodies 
I wish I knew the answer to your question. Its hard to look back and understand what we were thinking. Our current biases infect our old memories and they change every time we recall them. We only know our conscious impulses and not our subconscious desires which underlie everything.
I know for me its hard to guess what I was in the past. I wonder about myself. I generally think I was “always” a girl, but this is unproveable. And unfortunately as Kurt Gödel proved, many statements are gonna be true yet unproveable. The uncertainty bothers me, but its unavoidable.
I’m not trans, but I’ve definitely felt disphoria. I identify as a male but pretty often, I present as feminine and wear skirts and stuff. I like expressing the full me, no matter what clothes I wear. I never really liked calling myself a “man”, it just sticks me in this one mold, “boys” or “guys” can be molded in diffrent ways if you know what I mean.
You make such an interesting point about embodiment in relation to how (most people, I would hope) view gender in modern society – separate from one’s biological sex, and therefore essentially separate from one’s body.
To that I say; the body only has as much reign over gender as you let it, but society makes that incredibly difficult. In an ideal world, certain body parts would not be gendered nor sexualized, they would just…be. Society would expel expectations and roles based on physical appearance alone, and we could all live happily ever after. Unfortunately, that’s not the case as of now, nor do I think it will be in a very long time 😦