: Imagine women who grew up playing with barbies, who did a "girly" subject at university if they went, who wear pink dresses and hairbows, who have an ectomorphic frame and... well, whatever

@Rambettina586

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Imagine women who grew up playing with barbies, who did a "girly" subject at university if they went, who wear pink dresses and hairbows, who have an ectomorphic frame and... well, whatever stereotype you like. Let's see how much of a dilemma you have:

Real Women Don’t Wear
Dresses
is when writers portray female characters possessing traditional
feminine qualities as being less desirable, competent and reliable
instead of their tomboy foils.

Then show they're desirable, competent and reliable. Does anyone want to date/marry or befriend them? Can they do their job well (as in competently/reliably), whether it be as a software engineer or a bus driver?

They also tend to be presented as whiny
and annoying, even though they have traits or commit actions of worth
and merit.

It's up to you as the plot's designer to decide whether a real-woman-who-wears-a-dress works on fixing a problem they face or a problem someone else faces, but either way, don't have them whine. Protagonists trying to achieve something needn't whine. Making a character "not annoying" is a bit trickier, because they can annoy readers inadvertently, but that's what beta readers are for.

Many writers seem to believe that they need to epitomize a female
character’s strength through their ability to beat and to take
beatings from men, not their personality.

Don't be one of them. A lot of male characters' strengths aren't epitomized that way. Think outside the box with female characters as much as authors have with male ones. You can even blend your options. Does Turanga Leela fight well? Yes. But even if she hadn't, she would have been a space pilot and disciplined package deliverer, and would have campaigned on things that mattered to a believable extent (as opposed to this one), with a certain degree of pragmatic detachment whenever circumstances warrant it. The fighting was frosting, which you might like or dislike.

When people write “strong
female characters” (God, I hate that term) while ignoring the most
fundamental part of what it means to be a woman by not giving them
feminine traits and end up creating female characters that behave more
like men rather than women. As a male writer, I wish to pen women that
are strong in “classical feminine” ways in lieu of making them come
across as “men with tits”.

How should I deal with such a dilemma?

I hate that term too; my link above explains why. I suppose the most fundamental part of what it means to be a woman is to be someone who, while cognizant of how society tries to put her in boxes for being a woman, nonetheless has about as much agency as a working-class man getting the same treatment for completely different reasons. But fair enough: if you think wearing trousers detracts from her femininity, maybe you're more level-headed on this than I am. One issue I had to work on, according to a beta reader, was making the fact a character was female more relevant, more detectable.

But as per the points I've made before, if you don't want your female characters to be admirable in the way warriors are, make them admirable in the way other admirable males are. Think Hiccup, think Rupert, think... well, I'm a bit late to bring up the Doctor. But they must have done that last example well, because within a couple of weeks critics weren't saying "how can the Doctor be a woman, with all that implies?" They were saying, "well, one of the companions isn't fleshed out very well, plus I didn't care for that episode set in that place, for the kind of reason I might have said if it had happened a series earlier".

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