How will this work then?

So are newspaper headlines!

Cried at his own beauty? Good grief.

Well of course you can't "impose" a gender on a child. There are well documented cases of children of uncertain gender being brought up as one sex and as they grew up deciding that their parents had got it wrong. Tragically so in some cases when surgery had been involved. You can offer what clothes and toys you like but even very small children tend to have firm ideas about what they like.

Going by his past history this relationship isn't likely to last very long so the child may escape relatively unscathed.

The child would also have to be brought up in a bubble and without friends. Once children mix with their peers they soon know who they like,and want to be like and they will tell the child. I have no problem with dressing gender neutral, offering all kinds of toys and experiences etc. but I do think that there is an age when children begin to identify with a gender i.e I'm like mummy /daddy etc. Suspect it will possibly be as damaging as gender stereotyping!

A child isn't an experiment. A couple did it in Canada and it didn't end well.
I doubt he has the staying power, as Deedaa says. Hopefully his mother and extended family can make up for a 'difficult' father.

It's one thing to not "impose a gender" in terms of dressing children in certain colours, offering them gender neutral toys to play with, encouraging stereotypical boys activities to little girls and vice versa however knowing how weird RB can be I would not be at all surprised if he went 10 steps further and refused to give the child a boys or girls name, refuse to say whether indeed it was a boy or girl, dress "it" in a tutu, no matter what the sex.... Etc.

My middle DGD insisted that she was a horse, until she was about 5 . At 6 she insisted that she wasn't a horse after all . Phew sigh of relief there then. Nope at 6 she had morphed into a giraffe . I have an amazingly funny film of her "being a giraffe" . Now at 8 she is finally herself, a little girl with a HUGE imagination.

It was from the horse's mouth, he was on Jonathan Ross on Saturday.

Once again I would point out that gender is a grammatical term. Sex is the biological term.

This Russell Brand thing is such nonsense. I grew up in the 1950s when traditional attitudes were rather more clearcut. Nevertheless, I wore jeans and shorts as well as smocked frocks and had a clockwork train set as well as as a doll's cot. Absentdaughter, some decades later, had a beloved bus that she sometimes took to bed, played football, wore pretty "girly" things, some of them pink, and free-and-easy jeans and pants, depending on her mood. She and I both played with boys and girls when we were children – and her children do so now.

The fact remains that absentdaughter and I were both girls and now we are women. We both enjoy our womanhood. To try to pretend that there is no difference between boys and girls on such a superficial level is simply ridiculous.

God helps us,the world is mad !i need to go and talk to the cows at least they talk sense

Letitia most children (I include my own in this generalisation) are experiments, in one sense.
They are all born into families where Mum and Dad, not have any firsthand experience of bringing up children, basically haven't a clue, and make it up as they go along. Second and subsequent children are all as different as chalk and cheese, so the learning process starts all over again with numbers 2 and 3, and any preconceived ideas about childrearing soon give way to expediency.
Parental instinct is a poor thing compared to the knowledge gleaned from childcare experts, who very often within a generation are cast off and their ideas reviled.
I think people from other cultures would consider the way that children are brought up in this country now and in the past to be bizarre and even harmful.
Assuming that RB's child isn't subject to any physical abuse, I think we should perhaps be a little more tolerant and recognise that his child is just as likely to survive emotionally intact as many other children, including our own grandchildren.

I don't agree that parental instinct is a poor thing. It's what all our nearest relatives in the animal world (the other apes) use. Why shouldn't we also?

I did. Okay, it wasn't entirely instinct because obviously I'd learnt some stuff from my parents and from other parents I knew while I was growing up, but none of it was learned from books or "learned articles" written by experts or non-experts.

And, so far at any rate, it seems to have worked in producing independent, reliable, sensible, conscientious, caring adults.

We are animals. We need to remember that more often and trust our "instincts".

Well said Jean .

Bags I agree with you. I should have been more clear.
I couldn't bear to hear my babies cry and picked them up, cuddled and fed them against the prevailing advice of the time to let them cry and teach them 'discipline'
What I meant was that too many parents don't trust their instinct and rely too much on gurus and doctor Google.

Its not clear at all in the article how far Brand will go re 'without gender' of his forth coming child, it does come across that people are reading too much into it.

Oh, I see. Thanks, janea. I was the same. It was my dad to happened to say during a conversation long before I had kids that when a baby cries when it's on its own (or thinks it is), it's either hungry or it thinks it has been abandoned. He had a way with words. So I picked up my babies too when they cried.

Except once, when Minibags was less than four months old and I was still feeding her in the night. She was in a wee cot right beside my bed. She made a wee noise and I thought "Oh no! I'm too tired!" I made a noise that was meant to be reassuring back. She didn't wake me again till morning. When I told MrBags (who could sleep through it all) he said she'd made a contact noise, something that is very common in other species for reassurance during the night when it's dark and they can't see each other. Flocking birds do it during the day too when they're in shrubbery or other vegetation. Obviously I'd happened to make the return contact noise to her and she went back to sleep. Yuss!!

Not long after that she started sleeping round the clock from five till five which, since I'm a lark, suited me fine.

My DD was a complete screamer. She screamed from being born (5 weeks early) until she was around 2 and very rarely took breath. I had no-one to turn to for help and could have quite happily through myself (and her) from the top of the highest building.

What stopped me?

Exactly, gillybob. Maternal instinct, I'd say.

So how does this 'gender-neutral' thing work? If, say, all colours around the child are gender neutral, what happens if this child is a girl and notices other little girls wearing pink and wants a pink dress? Will she be told, no, you can have yellow, beige, green but not pink because it is stereotypically feminine?

I am not saying that I agree necessarily with little girls being dressed in pink all the time, having pink bedrooms, but from my experience pink pink pink is what the DGD wanted until DGD1 reached the age of 7 and decided pink was 'passé' and blue was her favourite colour.
Thank goodness she got it out of her system - had they refused to let her have pink clothes perhaps she would have developed an obsession with it in later life.

Or is pink OK?

He's a bigger prat than I thought he was. He might live to regret this decision, or hopefully his fiancee will come to her senses and bring the baby up normally, whatever that is!

Not sure how he will manage that in a world that divides people into genders, one of his fanciful ideas, which I hope dies a death before the poor kid is too confused.

Will he refer to the child as 'it'? Will 'it' have all gender specific pronouns removed?

What if, for example, 'it' is called "Apple" (and I only chose that as I can see apples on the tree as I type) and they want to refer to Apple's virtues or faults?

This is Apple. It is a very naughty Apple.It has pinched some of little Titania's clothes and she is very cross with it.

Other than that I see no problems at all with it.. oh, which it do I mean?

Agree with whitewave... Can anyone believe what is said in such magazines?

widh him uck in finding gender neutral clothese, looks like you either have pink/frills/tutus for girls - sometimes all in the same garment or bright colours/dinosaurs/trucks/tractors etc aines squarely at boys/ Also toy shops are full of pink or blue boxes, even ;lego has brought out a girls range & I would have though that it was as gender neutral as it comes

Oh no!! Lego nowadays is mainly either 'Friends', 'Frozen' (for girls) or war-like fantasy for boys.

There is always Minecraft lego which is gender-neutral! Or the good old-fashioned stuff - thank goodness we have a large box of years old Lego!

Perhaps in some ways he is right - there is far too much gender stereotyping of toys these days, aisles labelled 'Boys' Toys' and 'Girls' Toys'.

Both the DGD were dressed in denim the other day, can't get more gender-neutral than that!
however they did refer to each other as she as in 'she just said a naughty word', 'well, because she just pinched me'
Best friends really.