let me tell you a story about how not just gender roles but gender categories are highly culturally specific. in japan, in the 60s, there was a category called 'gayboy'; lots of people self-identified with it. what it meant was an AMAB person who dresses in a feminine way and enacts feminine roles. this can map onto a lot of stuff in other systems of understanding gender; actually, it was a pretty big tent. in the late 60s, a movie came out: half kitchen-sink drama and half documentary, Funeral Parade of Roses was a movie about life in tokyo's queer underground intercut with interviews with the cast and crew, themselves members of the tokyo queer underground, about their experiences of sex, gender, attraction, social roles, journeys of self-identification, and their similarity and differences with their characters. one of the questions that was asked, of many people, was 'why are you a gayboy?' the answers fell across a familiar spectrum, and again there's this temptation to place it on our own maps, which are ours because we prefer them and vice versa. for instance: 'i like being a girl', 'i like acting like a girl but only because i'm not a girl', 'i was bad at being a boy, and i found out that i'm naturally better at being a girl', 'i'm not exactly either a boy or girl', 'i'm a boy, this dress is just a fashion statement', 'i am not a gayboy, i am a traditional conservative woman with a birth defect'. now, the editor of japan's first gay magazine wrote a review of The Funeral Parade of Roses that took on a revolutionary tone, and afterward, the term gayboy fell out of favor and instead people refered to themselves as 'the rose tribe' -- as in, anyone who ever identified with something they saw in The Funeral Parade of Roses. the magazine pivoted to be the premire publication of the rose tribe, broadening its audience, but the old guard and the majority were gay men. in response to reader mail about gay male content crowding other stuff out of limited page space, the editor created a specific section called 'the lily tribe', which got guaranteed page space and was exclusive to femme-leaning content (while masc- and neutral- content could predominate elsewhere). this did not necessarily mean that the occasional lesbian or transfem article wouldn't make its way into the main body of the magazine if it was deemed of wide enough interest. the rose / lily categorization system seems to have remained the baseline in japan for a while (my direct knowledge of this part is very limited). today, our categories are more global and intersecting: anime will intentionally place trans flags or use bisexual lighting.
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