'You're some kind of girl!'

That was the charge thrown at me that hurt the most when I was a boy. I was not athletic, had little interest in sports (other than basketball), had my nose in a book much of time, liked to play the piano and sing. If I were growing up today, I might have been frog-marched into "transitioning" one reason I suppose why I react with such visceral dislike for trans propaganda -- the notion that one might be born into the "wrong body." I never hated my body and never had any wish to have a different one, although I wasn't happy when hair started appearing on the backs of my thighs and around my cock. So perhaps I have had a hard time empathizing with people who really hate their bodies and wish they had one of the opposite sex -- rather than just deciding to live for a while as if they were a member of the opposite sex. That's a good point you make how in smaller societies featuring large kinship networks where everybody knew everybody's business there would be social pressure not to abandon your yf when he grew out of your AOA (even assuming people could wrap themselves around the concept of an AOA). As far as I can tell, boys going to live with older males other than their fathers was quite common in pre-modern societies (other perhaps than within what was once called Christendom -- and even there apprenticeships were widespread) -- that sex sometimes happened -- again outside Christendom -- didn't really invite opprobrium. I'm generalizing, of course, but the AF was expected to be lifelong source of friendship, support, and even love and the real opprobrium was directed at the man who abandoned his yf when the boy started sprouting hair on his shins or his chin. SR