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Notes -
Hypothesis: Non-binary people will behave more like their natal sex if they are raised with the expectation of a traditionally binary male than if they are raised NB.
Since we won't be able to do this as a true RCT, we will need to find a natural experiment. We could just ask people how they were raised, but this isn't likely to yield accurate results due to self-identification biases. Instead, we can use something else as a proxy for likelihood (and maybe dose response) to traditional gender role exposure in childhood. The first thing that occurs to me is trying to poll for religiosity in childhood, which I would guess correlates fairly strongly with traditional gender roles. There are obviously reasons that this proxy could fail or be a covariate of something else that explains the result, but I think it's a reasonable first-pass to explore the topic, as long as we're OK with actually testing whether religiously-mediated gender roles have explanatory power.
As a measurement tool, we could attempt to record conversations on some topic and score for things like number of words spoken and attempts to explain the topic to the interlocutor. If I were coming from your sister's angle, I would hypothesize that religiously-mediated gender role expectations predict likelihood of speaking more words and explaining topics in conversations.
There are some obvious holes in this, but again, it's a first pass at trying to run an experiment to test the claim. Getting to the base truth might be difficult and I would expect some squirming if people don't like the results, but in principle you don't need complete epistemic helplessness on this one.
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