I’d be really curious to see what happened in a society where your social gender was determined by something else than your biological sex. Birth order, for instance. Odd male and even female, so that every family’s first child is considered a boy and their second a girl. Or vice versa. No matter what the biology. (Presumably, there’d need to be some certain sign of the gender to tell the two apart, like all social females wearing a dress and no social males doing so.)
The concept of the berdache might be relevant. The link is just to a Google search on the word, as the politics surrounding it leave me uncertain what to believe about the subject.
Ursula LeGuin has written a short story with a premise that’s not quite the same, but still interesting. (The introduction is the useful part, there—the story excerpt cuts off before getting anywhere terribly interesting.)
I’d be really curious to see what happened in a society where your social gender was determined by something else than your biological sex. Birth order, for instance. Odd male and even female, so that every family’s first child is considered a boy and their second a girl. Or vice versa. No matter what the biology. (Presumably, there’d need to be some certain sign of the gender to tell the two apart, like all social females wearing a dress and no social males doing so.)
The concept of the berdache might be relevant. The link is just to a Google search on the word, as the politics surrounding it leave me uncertain what to believe about the subject.
Ursula LeGuin has written a short story with a premise that’s not quite the same, but still interesting. (The introduction is the useful part, there—the story excerpt cuts off before getting anywhere terribly interesting.)
That is indeed an interesting variation of the premise. (It does feel a bit contrived, but then again, so does my original.)