Our first gender neutral Royal?

[Needmoresleep]

Obviously the main point of the Daily Mail is to provide stories that cause middle England to choke over their cornflakes. Lack of content or source not forming particular barriers if it hits two current obsessions: Meghan and trans.

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-6758701/Meghan-Markle-Prince-Harry-plan-raise-child-without-gender-stereotypes.html

Gender fluid isn't related to trans since trans folk are trying to identify as one gender or the other.

It's more about not making stereotypes such as blue for boy, pink for girl.
I bet they name their kid something like Jamie or Lindsay.

A white and grey nursery sounds a bit boring! What about multicoloured, rather than pink or blue?

I expect M&H mean a ‘let toys be toys’ approach, rather than pretending boys can be girls if they wear skirts to school, but that’s too sensible/boring to sell papers/gain clicks.

Doubt it will hold when it comes to picking a senior school though - most of the elite ones are single sex.

If this is a challenge to the deeply wierd royal sprog dress code; 50s throwback, heavily gendered, then it is a Good Thing.

Newborns don't see pastels too well and white and grey are completely boring for them. We painted the nursery in primary colours each time red, yellow and blue (not a baby blue anything in sight). And 20 years later my boys' rooms are painted azure blue and silver (DS1), a beautiful, deep turqoise (DS2) and lime green (DS3). That society has now gone backwards enough to apply these bollocks sex stereotypes even to colours is just incomprehensible to me.

I imagine that they've decorated the whole house in shades of grey and white. Currently thought to be fashionable and calming but not exclusively gender neutral. Green, yellow and red would be far better to stimulate the baby.
I'm guessing that toys and clothes with co-ordinate, definitely nothing from Fisher Price, Vtech or Playmobil.

Why is everyone associating gender fluid with grey and white? That's wrong too. It's more like if they have a boy it could have a pink room because colour isn't associated to gender.

I remain wholly unconvinced that babies require stimulating with coloured walls.

Grey and white is a fashion in nurseries, go on pinterest and type in nursery, everything is bloody grey.

LOL at ‘fluid’
Meghan should hang out on MN if they are trying to raise their kids to reject gender stereotypes thats great.. she’s in good company doing it!

Aside from the use of the silly modish “fluid” concept, I think this is good.
Sadly, raising children outside strict gender roles does seem to need conscious effort in these times. In my day (hitches bosom) ie the 70s most kids stuff wasn’t gendered. Clothes, toys, books were just clothes toys and books.

All the walls in my flat are white. My children have developed normally and there is plenty of colour in their lives and bedrooms. Although the 'nursery' or my younger child's bedroom is a space only used for sleeping and changing nappies so I don't think he cares what colour it is.

Gendering colours is stupid but beyond that I don't think interior design has got anything to do with parenting.

MagicMix The well known effects of colours on the psyche aside which one might seek to benefit from, no, no one needs coloured walls. I completely agree with you on that.

And it is also not a reflection on anyone's parenting skills whether you paint or wallpaper and in what colours or patterns.

However, when our oldest was born, nursery - shall we say trends? - were pastels. It looked like everything had been bleached, all colour had leeched from the environment newborns were put into.

At the time, studies were published showing that newborns showed very little reaction to pastels and a lot to bright colours. We didn't need brainscans for that though, did we? It's no coincidence that bright colours have been used for children's things for so long.

Our boys have always loved bright colours, complaining from a very young age that they didn't want clothes in the prevailing "boys' colours" of dark blue, dark green, brown and black.

So, yes, walls are largely irrelevant, you can bring bright colours into their environment in other ways. But in my experience, an astonishing number of parents colour coordinate the nursery far beyond just walls, even when pastel colours can barely be differentiated by newborns. And when I talk to them about a newborn's capacity to perceive colour, they're often surprised as they just didn't know.

ok, fair enough, but how will that work with whatever title the wee one may get - prince/princess, lord/lady whatever.

Of course, they may opt out of titles like Princess Anne did for her children.

Doubt it will hold when it comes to picking a senior school though - most of the elite ones are single sex

Aren’t single sex school less gender stereotyped though?

I believe the uptake of “opposite” gender subjects is better at single sex schools- for example more girls take science, as there are no “boys” subjects.

I went to a single sex school until 13. Raised in that environment i had no idea about maths and science until i took my options and found myself as the only girl in physics, and one of a handful in chemistry. Girls quite often didn’t take those subjects as they were worried about being the only girl in a class. And boys didn’t take art or home ec for fear of being seen as “gay”.

I doubt they intend to raise the child as gender fluid- just reject pink brain/blue brain stereotypes which can only be a good thing.

It’s not new in the Royal Family anyway. I read a fab anecdote about the queen, post war, showing a middle eastern royal around an estate. Knowing women aren’t allowed to drive, and having worked on vehicles during the war, she got in a 4x4 and proceeded to scare the life out of this bloke!

Of course, they may opt out of titles like Princess Anne did for her children.

Harry is titled, and so his children will be too. The titles are already known - a boy will be Earl something (far too lazy to look it up) and a girl will be Lady X Mountbatten-Windsor, I believe.

Why can’t they just say ‘we don’t want stereotypes pink for girl and blue for boy’? Why all the trendy band wagon wankery?

She does know it’s the royal family, right? If it’s a boy will she demand a title of princess and a tiara?

Nice idea in theory if it's about stereotypes/pinkification.

Good luck though trying to do it as a Royal with a child that will rarely be out of the press and will probably have a title like Lady or Princess.

She does know it’s the royal family, right? If it’s a boy will she demand a title of princess and a tiara?

You do know there is another parent too, its not just Meghan, Yeh?

I get the impression its the mum pushing this (Hollywood royalty and all that) - maybe because in our family the women are a stroppy lot the driving forces.

This is third hand gossip. Who knows what was said and in what context.

They are both pretty sex stereotype confirming, she is a stated feminist and he doesn't seem particularly sexist. So chances are they will be fairly gender critical in their choices for their baby, but without massively transgressing sex-based norms.

Oh dear, now this is the Sun’s front page splash:
www.thesun.co.uk/news/8543390/meghan-markle-prince-harry-gender-fluid-baby/

Completely unnecessary kicking going on here.

So now the papers like "they took so long to claim it as false". Fuck me, they can't win. I feel so sorry for them.

The fact that we even need the term 'gender fluid' is infuriating.

If it wasn't for the fact that gender stereotypes are so fucking ubiquitous, we'd all, naturally, be 'gender fluid. Gender fluid just means being true to yourself.

And agree, that gender fluid is the opposite of trans. Trans are the ones obsessed with gender and gender stereotypes.

Not really seeing the issue. Its quite weird though, that whenever I hear of people specifically trying to bring up a child 'gender neutral' they always go for browns, or black clothes. No nice colours at all

I try to keep stereotypes well away from my kids, but their schoo, seems to be obsessed with them.

Gender stereotypes are someone else's marketing tool: no more, no less. #Pinkification has now hit the nth degree: no wonder more and more parents are rejecting it and refusing to buy into this BS. It's not just pink and blue either: a stranger insisted I must have a girl in my pram because it happened to be purple!

As for gender fluidity, the term's meaningless because gender is fluid by definition. 20-teens discourses of what it means to be male, female or even a child are completely different to the way they were in 1910; therefore how can gender be static? Refusing to conform to pink for girls, blue for boys or rejecting the idea of pirates and princess parties isn't the same thing as gender neutrality by a long straw. It shows independence of mind rather than a sheep mentality. And whenever I encounter it, actually comes as something of a relief.