Petticoated male

I have a lot to unpack (heh) so bear with me please. This is a vent/advice/discussion so it's gonna be a long one so hold onto your butts and here we go... There may be triggers in here for some folks so please proceed with caution.
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I'm a 31 year old human who is going through a LOT of self discovery this year. I grew up in a traditional religious household where the women/girls were expected to follow certain rules and the men/boys were expected to make those rules. I have also experienced abuse at the hands of men/boys. To summarize I spent a majority of my childhood either being deathly afraid of men or feeling completely undermined by them. Despite this I STILL wanted to be a boy more than a girl growing up. Although in my young mind a lot of it might have to do with the feeling of not being good enough as a female.
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Fast forward to college and I am finally free to think and act in ways that I would NEVER have dreamed of doing while young... mostly accepting that I think girls are super pretty and I like them romantically. Cue me causing uproar with my mom (my dad had just passed away) because "You are choosing to sin and will not be protected by god". This hurt tremendously and I was still very much "brainwashed" into thinking that being gay was a choice but no matter the guilt I couldn't stop being attracted to women. I worked on it with my now ex girlfriend (we are still really good friends today) and realized that no matter what my religion preached or what the bible technically said or was interpreted as I couldn't choose not to be gay. For this reason and many others I slowly pulled away from religion and now consider myself an Atheist.
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After college I moved back in with my mom (she basically pretends like I was never in a relationship with a woman). I simply couldn't afford to live on my own. My mom and I grew close (she didn't raise me because she worked so my dad was my primary caregiver and also teachehomeschooler) and I did and still do look up to her. I started to dress more like her because as a whole I kinda suck at having any sort of style (most likely due to past "rules": no makeup, dress to cover everything up, don't look too nice or men will only want you for your body!) She really came out of her shell after dad passed away and she moved to a new state. She started wearing makeup and jewelry, and really just worked on being quite stylish. SO of course I wanted to look stylish too! Turns out my eye is drawn towards different things than my mom's eye but I still consider her to be my first "style idol".
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However this entire time I feel like I have this... male personality on top of my "normal presentation". I often had/have dreams where I am male or wake up/find myself in a male body. Often times growing up I would have times where this "male me" would come out and act a little different and for the longest time I feared I might have a personality disorder. I told my best friend all of this and she told me to try and integrate the different "personas" into one person... ie: recognize that they were all me the whole time. This was... complicated to say the least but it brought up a VERY interesting fact that I'd been actively ignoring. "WHY are all the 'others' in my head male?" I also came to realize that I just CAN'T picture myself as a female... at least not completely. When I try to envision myself in my head I see a boy (not a man, just a young probably teen boy or perhaps a younger adult than I am currently?) and to come to that realization absolutely left me gobsmacked.
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To work on accepting the "male parts" of my personality led me to find the term Gender-fluid which felt like it fit very comfortably with what I was dealing with internally. I thought Aha! Here is the term for what I'm dealing with... but now... I'm not so sure anymore. The more I think about it... the more I feel like I might actually want to BE male but I most definitely do NOT want to be the kind of male my mind automatically tries to associate with masculinity. I am... to put it in the most blunt way possible a effeminate as you can possibly get. I love pink, lace, ribbons, flowers, glitter, and bows. I love to dress in over the top fluffy petticoated skirts and dresses just for fun, and I ADORE pastel rainbow/unicorn themed anything. And this is where I'm struggling... all these things are almost always pegged as "girl things" not "boy things" and it very much bugs me. I still want to be seen as pretty, and cute, and sweet but I /think/ I would also very much like to be seen as a boy. I don't want my breasts they don't belong there and I don't want my cycle... I don't want to be called she/her all the time. "They" is okay... but... sometimes it doesn't feel like it's enough?
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I'm working on losing weight (I am also very overweight and this also bothers me very much) and I did finally find a therapist who is well versed in LGBT issues and is willing to go to bat for me and give me resources for when I am ready to begin the process of getting top and possibly bottom surgery. I am not looking to go on Hormones because I don't want my voice to drop (I am a singer and I take great pride in my soprano range).
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All of this is a LOT to go through in one year. To suddenly realize that hey... you might be trans but you are scared and wanting to hold onto both what is familiar and also not be ostracized for being gender non-conforming/not masculine enough. Basically at this point I'm almost certainly that stereotypical "Soft Boi" and I almost hate it... I don't want to change my personality at all because I kinda like the person I've grown into I just hate the body I've been given.
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TL;DR: Hyper religious past and super feminine interests leads to life of denial and struggles with fitting in as "male" while still being both read as and stereotypically having the interests as a female. Also see: emotionally sensitive person just wants a hug and to be protected.

I read recently about how some women, at the turn of the 20th century, started using hatpins as weapons to defend themselves against male harassers. It created quite the controversy and newspapers took it in stride by writing about the "peril" those hatpins could cause (up to the point were some people were asking for a law to prevent long hatpins).
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While reading on the subject, I happened on a twitter user who claims in a thread on the matter that "one prominent man accused [those women] of being "petticoated swhashbucklers" (tumblr source which brought on the question - originally a twitter thread but I don't have twitter so I cannot get to the original text).
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I love the expression, but I am absolutely unable to find the source of the quote. I have only one article from the Smithsonian (from 2014) talking about the "Hatpin Peril" ; and going through the Library of Congress digitized newspapers, I never had any results for the terms "hatpin" and "swashbuckler" or "petticoated".

I know we sometimes have quarrels about what is RR and what isn't, and I hope we don't let that tear us apart. Some you are just average guys who want girls to cherish you and sweep you off your feet (maybe even literally), and another group would love to be a shade of femme and still be loved by a girl. For the later group, I made something just for you: Male_Lesbians. Excuse the title, some people in an AskReddit thread inspired it. I don't mean any harm to actual lesbians. It's supposed to be a place for feminine-presenting guys and the women that like them.
If that's too vanilla for you, you can look into some of the NSFW sister subs: petticoating: Forced feminization XDresserDoms: Crossdressers that are also doms in bed MaleLesbiansNSFW: Men and their SOs in frilly lingerie
 
Feel free to ask me anything about these subs.