The popular Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, is happy to announce that not only is she expecting a baby at the end of April: she’s expecting a feminist. Last month, Vanity Fair reported that she and Prince Harry plan to raise the child as “gender fluid”. That’s to say, not burdening the child with male or female stereotypes: no pink-themed or blue-themed nurseries or baby clothes. No dolls for a girl, toy trucks for a boy. But a palace spokesman told Hello! that the story was “totally false”. Whether or not it’s true, I’d suggest that Meghan might report back to us with these theories in 10 years’ time, when she’s had a little more experience. A friend of mine once told me she’d be delighted if her baby son grew up to be gay. Gay men were always kind to their mothers, and she would thus never lose him to another woman. She dressed him, from infancy, in beautiful clothes that some thought distinctly feminine. He was a very pretty little boy indeed. But he grew up to be emphatically and contentedly heterosexual. Parents cannot dictate a child’s personality. Meghan and Harry’s baby may be carefully programmed with all the feminist, gender-neutral and “woke” attitudes they can summon. But the child will have his, or her, unique character from the start, and that will decide whether they accept, or reject, the parents’ nostrums. Stereotyping is indeed limiting – many girls enjoy what are deemed to be boys’ toys, and vice-versa – but there remains much evidence that male and female brains usually differ, from the earliest moments of development. Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of developmental psychopathology at Cambridge, has stressed, in a recent review of The Gendered Brain by Gina Rippon, that research among babies just one day from birth has shown that females, on average, react more positively to people, while males react more positively to objects. The brain is wired differently. So, Meghan, let’s return to those theories a decade on …