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Any "genderswapped" authority figures have obviously just been converted to their still-closeted counterparts. Abrogail and Maidrayne have always been trans, it's just never been explicitly stated because it's not a big deal in the main setting.
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Can I ask where you got "small tribes" from? LO:ME doesn't say a ton about the shape of Anadi society, but it does talk about many cities in their homeland of Nurvatcha.
After checking back, I probably made that assumption from the fact that their society are described as "communal", the fact that they are described as "reclusive" and "live deep within woodlands, jungles, and other untamed areas of wilderness". Likewise for the "one vote per web marriage" par of their society, that evoke (to me at least) the idea of all anadi of a given tribe, or town congregating and "casting their vote" on the open, rather than on a ballot, which I can only imagine for a relatively small group rather than a congregation of thousands.
All those describtors kinda made me think of anadi society as tight-knit but relatively isolated "tribes", who nevertheless have relations to each other and are ready to help one another if need be. I envision the "council of elected official" in Domithari less as a direct ruling power, but more as a diplomatic one, with each official being here to represent their settlement and their work being facilitating inter-settlement relationship instead of edicting global laws.
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Sidenote on the animal world conversation, in general though don't reptiles and insects/spiders all follow the general "female of the species is bigger and stronger" dichotomy? (I remember birds being pretty generally gender neutral regarding that with them its mostly matter of color of feathers and with mammals there are definitely few species like hyenas)
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Sidenote on the animal world conversation, in general though don't reptiles and insects/spiders all follow the general "female of the species is bigger and stronger" dichotomy? (I remember birds being pretty generally gender neutral regarding that with them its mostly matter of color of feathers and with mammals there are definitely few species like hyenas)
It vary depending on the species of course, but generally, yes. In species with a large number of predators, the female must be "stronger", simply because she need to survive longer than the male reproduction wise. Males can drop dead right after reproduction and their "job" would still be carried out, female need more time to actually grow and lay the eggs (and need more nutriments for that).
And that's only for those species that abandon their youth the moment the egg is out, all those that care for the eggs or newborn need at least one parent to survive even longer, which is often the female because once more she's the one that's "guaranteed" to be there when the eggs are laid, since she's doing it herself.
As a rule of thumb, only when the species are more social, and when both parents are likely to care for the youth, does the male tend to start to "catch up" to the female size and strenght wise. Altho there is one more reason for females to be bigger, which is the size of the litter. Carrying one or five eggs/baby is already rather taxing, but arthropods often have much larger litters. When the number of offspring number in the dozens, or even the hundred, the female need to be that much bigger and stronger simply because she need the strenght to hunt and "stock" enought food.
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Presumably, those Runelords would be exceptions to the rule. You can have a female ruler in an otherwise patriarchal society. England's been ruled by queens for a long time.Correct. Any individually powerful person/entity was left untouched (this obviously extends to gods such as Iomedae). Remarkable outliers certainly exist in the world and the PC's are meant to highlight that.
How does a patriarchy that worships Iomedae work? The (male) pope comes out and says "Young ladies, today I'm going to tell you about a mortal woman who fought injustice and all. She was right and holy to do so, and so she became a goddess herself, but don't you get any ideas!"
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I do think that Christian-style patriarchy might not be a great fit for a setting with so many goddesses and queens and warladies. I could see something more balanced, though, like a matrilineal society or power sharing dynamic that still expects most people to follow gender roles of some kind. I'm thinking of the Iroquois Confederacy, which still had men effectively in charge but gave women their own kind of authority, sort of a "men get the power but women choose which man gets it" situation. I could be thinking of a different society, mind you.
Like I said, though, this is a world with dragons. If someone wants to sacrifice some realism in order to play with a more modern "Western" idea of patriarchy to overcome, I think that's fine!
EDIT: As a counterpoint, though, one of the societies most infamous for its misogyny, Ancient Greece, had a female war goddess who seems to have been very respected. Exceptions are used to prove the rule in societies like that.
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The war godess bit is true, altho we have to remind ourselves that most of the records we have of that time come from Athens, and she was the patron godess of that city. It's quite likely that her importance in the greek pantheon was exagerated by the athenians, and that the rest of greece saw her as a more minor figure.
But even if it's true, it doesn't change the fact that athenians were still very sexist, while worshipping athena as a godess of war and culture (two things that were pretty much male only in athens).
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** spoiler omitted **Sidenote on the animal world conversation, in general though don't reptiles and insects/spiders all follow the general "female of the species is bigger and stronger" dichotomy? (I remember birds being pretty generally gender neutral regarding that with them its mostly matter of color of feathers and with mammals there are definitely few species like hyenas)
"Putting on my professional zoologist" cap
Sexual dimorphism in size can be variable among all of these groups. If you have a breeding system where males fight or defend harems, than the males will generally be larger, because size matters in a fight, and so there is selection for that. On the other hand, if you are something that lays eggs or has a lot of young, than a larger body size might be advantageous, because reproducing is hard work and takes a lot of energy out of the mom...larger size means you have more resources in your body to mobilize to turn into babies. Plus a large size can help you defend your babies.
So anole lizards and stag beetles will have bigger males, so they can more effectively beat each other up. In contrast, Pythons and Birds of Prey the female is larger, presumably because they can then spend more time guarding eggs without getting hungry, or just be able to produce larger clutches of eggs (which I think is the situation with snakes).
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EDIT: As a counterpoint, though, one of the societies most infamous for its misogyny, Ancient Greece, had a female war goddess who seems to have been very respected. Exceptions are used to prove the rule in societies like that.
I was about to draft my response only to find you answered it perfectly. Iomedae is seen as an exemplar of strength, righteousness and infinite courage - the values the (male) paladins of Iomedae hold in high regard. She is beyond gender considerations and her clergy focuses on her current divinity rather than her path of ascension.
I've written up that the Glorious Reclamation is made up entirely of male paladins and a mixed gender congregation in the clergy. I haven't yet decided if I want to set that as immutable, my PC's haven't reached Kintargo yet.
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The war goddess bit is true, altho we have to remind ourselves that most of the records we have of that time come from Athens, and she was the patron godess of that city. It's quite likely that her importance in the greek pantheon was exagerated by the athenians, and that the rest of greece saw her as a more minor figure.
Athena may well have begun as only a pretty local goddess, but if so that was in a very early period. By the time of the classical Athens we all know and love, Athena can be found all over the place, with numerous cults and temples from Italy to Anatolia. For example, she had a prominent place in Syracuse, the most powerful polis of the Greek west, which would go on to cripplingly defeat the Athenians themselves during the Peloponnesian War.
In the literary as opposed to the archaeological record, she's also pretty prominent even in some of the earliest literature we have - a leading goddess in the Iliad and even more so in the Odyssey, and also frequently mentioned in Hesiod. None of which were composed in or are specially about Athens (Hesiod tells us that he lived near Thebes and his father came from Anatolia; there is no authorial info in the Iliad or Odyssey, but the scholarly consensus points towards Anatolian composition).
I've seen suggestions that various figures in Minoan religious imagery may represent Athena, which if correct would put her already outside Attica on the order of a thousand years before the Athens of Pericles or Plato. I'm not sure whether any consensus has formed around this topic, either accepting or rejecting the identification, though.
Going from early to late, she of course becomes even more ubiquitous in Hellenistic and (especially) Roman times. In the former case, there are a lot of cities in the post-Alexander East that end up associated with Athena in the form of Athena Polias. These long postdate Athens becoming a major center of cultural prestige in the Greek world, though, and many instances of Athena Polias surely owe their existence to the influence of that cultural prestige. If you need a protective patron deity for your newly founded Hellenistic polis, it's not a great leap to borrow Athena, already the patron and protector of many of the most famous and influential old Greek poleis.
Athena becomes so prominent that even non-Greeks begin borrowing her image for things like coinage (such as this interesting coin minted in Achaemenid Lycia, with the head of the local satrap Artembares on one side and helmeted Athena on the other).
Moving on even later, to Roman times, she crops up in yet more places. There are various reasons for this; notable among these is Minerva's role in the Roman Capitoline Triad consisting of Jupiter-Juno-Minerva. Since Greek Athena is identified with and syncretized with Roman Minerva, when Minerva is re-exported along with the idea of the Triad to the areas of the Greek East that come under Roman influence, she frequently arrives as Athena again.
I hate to be the one to say it, but we should probably move this discussion elsewhere. We're on, like, a tangent of a tangent.
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If I felt very strongly about staying on topic, I'd have given up posting here like a decade ago. :)
But okay, well, staying on the theme of deities, here's something I prefer to change about Golarion (and some other settings as applicable): not all clerics are clerics of one specific god, and even those that are tend have relationships that are more "there are many gods, and it's my job to perform the rituals for and invoke the blessings of this particular one" rather than "there are many gods, and I have special personal belief and faith in this particular one."
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Ah, "recent" change in my setting, but there's a sizable portion of true neutral/chaotic neutral Rovagug followers in the darklands, that worship It as a nature god, much like Gozreh is worshipped on the surface.
The idea is simple, what "naturally" shape the darklands isn't the wind or the rain, nor the sun and the day/night cycle, but the earthquakes and landslides, that can detroy entire caves or open up new ones. All of which are being provocked by rovagug moving at the center of the planet. Even if these are just an aftertought to It, and just a consequences of the rough beast "shacking it's cage", the fact remain that it's Rovagug power that shape these lands, and as such people pray that the beast open up new path or burry dangerous passages in the same way they might pray Gozreh for rains, for a calm sea, or pray to Sarenrae for the sun to shine bright.
Also, I made it so that every creature with tremorsense can somewhat "feel" rovagug, deep down bellow. For those with that special sense, the beast is like an underground sun, sometime "obscured" by clouds but yet it's presence is always felt. You can sense It better and better the deeper down you go, and if you stand in the upper floors of an artificial structure, you may not be able to sense It at all. It's also one more reason why It have a lot more worshippers in the darklands, because down there It's power and presence is much more "paleable" than on the surface. Actually the comparison to Sarenrae goes a bit deeper, because in my setting, Rovagug's the one that make golarion core hot, and thus It really is "the sun of the depth".
The Beast actually do empower some of these CN/TN clerics, but it's power don't come for free and they're always affected by It's minor curse and always have the feeling that they have to loosen the beast bond somewhat. A lot actually end up turning full evil the first time they get emprisonned (and thus experience it's curse for the first time), as the beast flood their mind with the idea that their imprisonment is the same as rovagug's, and that they'll never be free until It is. Otherwise, It's anathema is pretty much the same for them (with the added idea that aiding a third party create something don't break the anathema, which is why they're always under the minor curse), but It's edict become "shake the earth, destroy as many path as you open, loosen Rovagug's bonds".
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Ah, "recent" change in my setting, but there's a sizable portion of true neutral/chaotic neutral Rovagug followers in the darklands, that worship It as a nature god, much like Gozreh is worshipped on the surface.
That's worth copying.