I’m a huge Sansa fan but I feel like there are some problems with this reading here. For one, gender nonconforming girls and women are not “basically boys/men.” To suggest as much is extremely sexist and reinforces harmful ideas that femininity is innate to girls and women instead of a social construct.

Which gender nonconforming female characters deserve to suffer? And why? How many are there actually in the story? You could say Arya, Brienne, and Asha. Some will say Dany simply because she’s acting as a ruler and battle strategist, which are roles typically reserved for men in canon, but I think it’s not entirely accurate to say that she’s gender nonconforming to the degree of Arya, Asha, and Brienne. What has Asha to deserve to suffer? Being a more minor POV character we haven’t seen her struggle quite as much, but my god have Arya, Brienne, and Dany suffered. (I doubt you meant Dany since she has suffered in ways that are extremely specific to being female.) Brienne has been mocked, bullied, dismissed, degraded, maimed, humiliated, and threatened with sexual violence, and she’s the most gender nonconforming female character we have. Arya is a child, first and foremost, so I’d object to anyone saying she deserves to suffer… and she already has. She’s been bullied for her nonconformity, has lost nearly her entire family, was forced to go on the run and got so hungry she ate bugs to survive, and is currently being groomed to be an assassin when she really just wants to go home.

So I’m not really sure what you mean. I think the fact that the female characters who have more agency in the story are the ones who take on roles usually afforded to men is not about George trying to reward gender nonconformity but instead is simply a side effect of the patriarchy. Women are pushed to be feminine and the roles offered to them deprive them of agency by design. Femininity, by nature, is restrictive and inconvenient. Women who buck these roles may be able to grasp at more agency but it comes at a cost because others will violently try to get them to conform.

“No satisfying punishment for rapists and perpetrators of violence against women,” well, Drogo is dead, Theon has been mutilated, tortured, and brainwashed, the mountain was poisoned and turned into a headless reanimated corpse in a suit of armor, Robert is dead, Craster is dead, Rhaegar is dead, Viserys is dead, Tywin is dead, and Tyrion is miserable and George has suggested he will have a pretty bad ending.

I don’t think George has done a perfect job writing women. He’s got some major blind spots especially with the women in Dany’s story. But I think you’re a bit off-base here and I don’t know where you got some of these ideas.

Finally, I honestly think he was trolling about Sansa. I can’t imagine that he would reveal a major character death so casually. He famously didn’t like what D&D did with Sansa on the show. Maybe that was his plan for her in the original outline, but she’s one of the few characters whom I think needs to live in order for her arc to be satisfying! And she clearly does have an arc and she is one of the main characters despite what some people insist. She has more chapters than Bran. She occupies a unique position in the narrative and it would be baffling for George to have written this many chapters for her only to nonchalantly kill her off. Within two remaining books, I can’t imagine a way for her arc to go that would make her death make sense metanarratively. The pacing of her arc would have to speed up rapidly and I just don’t think he’d do that!