Eliminating "push factors" for traditional gender roles and homophobia in preindustrial secondary fantasy

Tl;Dr: Does your fantasy setting eschew "traditional" patriarchal expectations for women and/or social stigma towards LGBT people? If so, what factors got your society to that point? Or does it matter at all?

Context: I'm working on a fantasy world that draws inspiration from England, Ireland, colonial America (particularly frontier towns), and combines that with a tributary mercantilist economy ruled over by governors who answer, in turn, to an immortal king.

My alphas independently questioned this setting's:

1) relative gender equality. the protagonist, an unmarried childless woman in her 30s, is a respected (if considered a bit provincial) town chief.

2) lack of homophobia. protagonist's brother is gay; another character is bisexual; there are allusions to a female background character's wife.

Originally I hadn't even thought to justify either choice. Then I showed my draft to a history buff and a sociologist annnnnnd...yeah, I started thinking through historical push factors towards old roles and bigotries.

My solutions so far are:

An immortal king who banned hereditary public authority to reduce the odds of dynasties challenging him for power.

Capitalism on the margins: Once you supply your quota, you can keep or sell the rest, but your property is the king's first. He doesn't seize wealth often, but it has happened enough that aristocrats are careful.

A sort of UBI. The "king's bread" is an allotment of food distributed monthly to every town and settlement. Chiefs are expected to keep their people fed; resources one region is poor in will be shipped from somewhere else and vice versa.

Widespread availability of a silphium-inspired magical contraceptive.

A state religion headed up by the King that treats competence, usefulness, and contribution as society's highest virtues. He's not doing any of it because he's a nice egalitarian. He's an immortal engineer trying to create a stable if stagnant society after centuries of instability, and landed on "be useful and contribute however you can" rather than "be fruitful because half of your children will die."

Obviously it doesn't work perfectly. new bigotries arise, a secret group of oligarchs long ago captured the governorships and rotates children between them, etc. But it's an attempt to answer the (at first baffling) question: "why does this woman have so much autonomy? Why doesn't anybody care that her brother is gay?"

To be clear, I don't think any setting *needs* to do this. But since I hadn't really thought it through, I decided to noodle around with it. What'd you do?

EDIT: Guys, why am I seeing people get downvoted? Nobody's being particularly rude. "Yeah I don't think you're there yet" is a fair response to make. "Your idea sucks and you should give up on it" would merit downvoting.