By Message, again:

What would she change about Osirion, if she was in a position to ask that from the government?  How would she want her daughters' lives, or her sons' lives for that matter, to be different from her own life or her husband's life?

It should be illegal for a man to remarry if he has only living daughters, because he'll have sons by the second wife and treat her family better.

Sounds possibly sensible, given Osirion's overall orientation, but... would she say that it ought, perhaps, to also be possible to have an exception to this rule, if the man paid over enough money escrowed to his previous daughters' dowries, say, so that they couldn't end up too neglected?

- sure, that'd probably work.

So this is sort of a complicated question and hopefully a gold piece - probably more than her daily earnings as Keltham understands those? - is enough to pay for a thoughtful answer, even if the gold piece just goes to her 'household'...

Suppose some dreadful meddling foreigner came in and told Osirion that its laws had to be the same for men and women, and halflings and tieflings and elves too, but men and women are the main focus here.  You can make a law that the person with higher Wisdom gets to be in charge of the household; you can make a law about asking people under truthspell if they've ever gotten drunk and hurt somebody; you can't make any law that talks about whether or not somebody has a penis.  You can talk about whether somebody has a child, but not whether that person was mother or father, the child girl or boy.

She can also suppose things like that truthspells have become cheaper, a tenth of the current cost, say, if that helps her put Osirion back together.  If it's absolutely vital that a way exist to determine whether a child belongs to a particular parent, what used to be called a father, she can suppose that a way exists.

How would she repair Osirion's laws so that this dreadful meddling foreigner does as little damage as possible to Osirion, and as many people as possible end up in Axis or Elysium rather than Hell or the Maelstrom?

....can you make a law that talks about whether someone can bear children? Is currently pregnant?

...possibly, if she doesn't try to pull any Shenanigans with this, e.g. by talking about whether somebody has ever been pregnant, has the capability to get pregnant, etcetera.  If there's a law that's just about it being extra bad to murder somebody who's carrying a baby right now, for example, Keltham will let her get away with it.

Well, she thinks that if the government had to do that then it should probably just not do anything except prosecute murder, and count it as murder if you abandon your children and they die. Because it wouldn't be able to do anything else useful, and that seems like it would at least serve the purpose of not letting men abandon their families.

...are there no measurable differences between men and women, other than anatomy, corresponding to all the ways in which it is so terribly terribly important to treat men and women differently?  Is there no externally visible quality of a woman, besides her ability to get pregnant, that corresponds to the fact that it's usually better if a man controls a household's spending money, rather than the woman being the one to control it?

Though, to be clear, she should feel very free to deny the premise that it's better for the man to control everyone's money than for everyone to have separate budgets; Keltham comes from a world where everybody has separate budgets, but people there are also smarter and richer and it's essentially impossible for a child to starve.

...usually a man inherits the household from his father when he is in his thirties or forties and his father dies. His wife married into the household somewhat recently and doesn't know nearly as much about it because of how she didn't grow up in it. You could maybe make a rule that the person who currently controls the household picks their successor?

Sure, that's how it works where Keltham is from.  The person who owns something gets to pick the person who inherits it; though if it's something divisible like money, they usually give some of it to charity and not just their kids.

What else goes wrong, now that the law can't distinguish men and women?

Well,  probably all the things that generally go wrong when you don't have a government? 

Preventing theft doesn't seem like something that needs to distinguish men and women.

Well, the government doesn't do that really? 

Okay, so what does go wrong when you don't have a government, if you don't need a government for preventing thefts?

....she doesn't really know. Probably other countries invade you and sometimes there are blood feuds and you don't get any aqueducts or nice things like that.

None of this appears to depend on legally treating men and women in any way differently?

....you can't have an army if you're not allowed to do conscription. She supposes they could conscript all the women but then everything would be completely horrible, probably worse than having no army.

Test people on combat ability, truthspell them to see if they were sandbagging it.  Assuming you can't just pay people enough to have an army that way but that is a separate topic Keltham is Concerned about.

Or maybe there's a Detect Strength spell that goes with Bull's Strength, the way there's a Detect Thoughts spell that corresponds to Fox's Cunning, some way to detect Strength and not just augment it.  Strength is an externally visible and measurable quality that determines who you want in your army; you don't need to go by the presence of penises.  That's an example of the sort of idea Keltham was talking about when he asked how to put a country back together, after you stopped being able to measure people's sex and treat them differently based on that.

He's particularly interested in what externally visible or measurable qualities of women make them supposedly unable to own property without everybody ending up in the Maelstrom, or which qualities enable men to own things when women allegedly shouldn't.  Maybe people could measure that as a qualification test of property ownership, instead of penis presence.

....but then strong women would be forced to join the army, which seems terrible!!! 

...yes, yes it is, but how is it more terrible than strong men being forced to join an army for less than their self-set wage for that?

....because they'll never be able to get married or have a normal life, whereas after the levy's dispersed the men will be completely fine?

...why will they never be able to get married or have a normal life after the levy's dispersed.

Because no man would marry a woman who was in the army and around lots of men. ....this conversation might work better if it weren't over Message and she could say longer things.

He's fine with that, if she's willing to speak aloud and doesn't wish to guard her own privacy.

His reply to her last statement is that it sounds like - the army would need strong enough internal governance to prevent women in it from being raped, but you could do that with cheaper truthspells?  Actually Keltham is confused here, is Osirion familiar with the fact that it always takes roughly nine months to have a baby, and if you wait a year since a woman leaves the army, any baby she has after that is guaranteed to be with a father from after she left the army?  There's animals where the females take in male seed and retain it their whole lives, but humans are not one of those animals - is that misunderstanding possibly the root of Osirion's entire thing, here -