Sex, Gender, Sexuality, and Family

Broadly speaking, the Sealands as a setting should be maximally queer-friendly. The rest is details.

Assumptions about the setting

• In a world in which shapechangers exist, and a person can do time as a frog if they piss off the wrong creature, surely physical fluidity is not as big a deal as it is in the real world—let alone gender fluidity.
• In a world in which cantrips like Message and Mending exist, surely contraception and abortifacents are relatively common and reliable.
• On the other hand, magic is powerful, but mostly individual, difficult, and not scaleable. It doesn't replace industry, but it's useful enough to suppress the desire to develop industry. Thus, for most people, the most accessible source of labour is still their own children.
• "maximally queer-friendly" doesn't mean the Sealands are a featureless utopia; clichés and assumptions always exist, but they're likely to be different.

Therefore, some general precepts

Physical sex

• Feyness inherently means a changeable nature, and fey creatures are more likely to be physically malleable than purely mundane peoples. Elves have a higher likelihood of being born intersex than humans (5% as opposed to 1.5%). Brownies, natives of The Feywild who sometimes appear in the mundane world, can change their physical sex every day if they choose. This has no visible effect unless they take off their clothes.
• Because of this influence, even for mundane people, transitioning in the sense of physical transformation is not a huge deal—though it is difficult and rare.

Gender and gender roles

• Non-binary people exist, and are more common than in the real world.
• In some societies, some non-binary people have a kind of special status—for instance, in orcish societies, poets have a ritual function and are considered to exist outside of cultural norms, including gender roles.
• Other peoples just have very different concepts of gender from the outset. Lizardfolk, dragonborn, and other non-mammals don't get the big deal about gender and prefer not to be involved. Elves, whose lifespan is several times longer than their memory, see no problem in shifting identity over the course of their very long lives, including their gender.
• Women and men perform many of the same roles (i.e., hunter, soldier, servant, craftsperson, etc.) but this varies a bit from one society to the next.
• Simplistic gender clichés exist but are different. In some societies, the cliché is that "women plan, men do"; an artisan's workshop in which the crafters are men, but the boss is a woman, would seem very natural.
• For instance laundry and scrubbing floors are considered men's work, because they take a lot of strength. On the other hand, a steward or butler is very likely to be a woman.
• None of these are very strict rules, there's no prescriptive sense in most societies of "women's work" or the opposite.

Sexuality

• The categories homosexuality and heterosexuality don't exist. Everyone is bisexual at least in potentia, though many/most people prefer one gender over the other.
• It's very common across societies for people to sow their wild oats in youth, with whatever partners they want, and then to settle down into one's family responsibilities (that is, having children).
• However not everybody does this, for instance in large families—if your siblings have already had plenty of kids, pressure's off and you can just be the cool uncle/aunt.

Family and children

• Marriage is generally a domestic/economic arrangement between people who have children together—thus it's generally understood to be heterosexual.
• Most societies see domestic love as something different from romantic or passionate love, though they can overlap. Stories of passionate love affairs don't naturally end in marriage as happily-ever-after.
• Depending on the society, marriage might be monogamous, or it might be a domestic arrangement that doesn't preclude other activities on the side.
• In many societies, a married couple isn't the focal point of a family unit, which might be very large and include cousins of various degrees. There's no such thing as a nuclear family.
• Same-sex life partners exist. This is often a non-issue, but depending on the society, it might be frowned upon (as avoiding one's familial responsibilities), or merely tolerated (see the cool uncle/aunt, above). It's never seen as Eeeevil.