Creating a Queernorm Fantasy Setting: Exploring True Gender Equity

I made a decision very very early in honing my writing as a craft. I was never going to center a story around what someone of a certain gender could or couldn’t do.
You’re not going to read a story from me about a young girl who has to pretend to be a boy to join the royal guard because half the royal guard is already women. It’s not something a woman would be barred from. While there is value in stories of women overcoming patriarchal obstacles, I’ve always felt more inclined to imagine a world where those obstacles simply don’t exist. To restructure everything so that women don’t have to prove themselves as warriors and men are allowed into care giving roles without comment. And this was of particular import for human societies, not just non-human species where I could build from alien biology.
But this equability of roles by nature had to exist as the echo of a larger society, and that’s what I had to construct. The unfortunate fact is that creating divisions of labor across gendered lines is an extremely common way for humans to arrange themselves. This structure in isolation can absolutely be neutral, but too often it devolves into a system of sexist oppression. So what does it take to unsettle those bonds and steer humans into that place of gender neutrality?
Because we are a dimorphic species, there would be things we would very naturally cling to. When (roughly) one half of the population can get pregnant, and the other can’t, that would force a social structure. When one half, on average, is larger with higher muscle mass, that would force a social structure.
But what is inevitable and what is arbitrary? What is inherent to the human condition, and what’s a construct created by those who wish to maintain certain power dynamics?
What if, among one subgroup of humans, women were the ones that were favored by high-level magic ability? The kind of thing that could rip a sword from a person’s hand and render it unusable. What if vampirism, the only thing of value to another subgroup, was only passed down reliably through mitochondrial DNA? What if too many young boys died from a certain magical alteration before they realized there was something on Y-chromosome that kept the magic from sticking? How might little magical details that hinged on chromosomes infiltrate the way gender roles were formed across human societies with access to this energy?
What if human colonizers met a species with only one sex? Or where they couldn’t tell the sexes from each other? Or a highly matriarchal species that saw the womb as the direct connection to their deity and the logic they presented for this…sort of made sense to the right human mind?
I think, optimistically, I see humans as being capable of unexpected social plasticity. When faced down with a completely different set of rules for gender and sex, I have a hard time believing they wouldn’t collectively re-evolve their perception of such things. And so I built from there to form a version of humanity that’s assimilated this influence.
Here, I see either the fall of or the failure to build the patriarchal structures we’re so familiar with in the real world. Without those structures, the boxes around expectations for gender have looser borders. Looser borders lead to broader options for expression in regard to perceived gender.
The trickle down is I can write a story where a man wears a dress and the story isn’t about the man wearing a dress. It’s just a thing that happens because dresses are comfortable and everyone wears them.
And that is the normalization that I’m shooting for. That of course women can be knights, what a weird thing to question. That two women can be together, what a weird thing to question. That someone born with a vulva can realize they’re a man later in life. Of course. I just a met a giant bat person with both sets of genitals from a society that uses genetic probability to limit breeding in an effort to manage the tri-gender ratio of its population. A human using gender neutral neo-pronouns is the least weird thing I’ve seen today.