another way to look at the swaying odds
Updated/reviewed 12-24-17
For more of this type of reading, please check out the following essays on swaying here: http://genderdreaming.com/forum/gend...s-swaying.html
Another way to look at the swaying odds...
Often we hear of gender selection being compared to a flip of a coin. We’ve heard it said so often that it’s hard to step away from that all-or-nothing expectation, and consequently when we sway, it’s tough to envision anything other than heads or tails, black and white…or in our case, pink or blue. “If you do these things, you are guaranteed your gender.” And so when we see people IRL who seem to eat right off the boy diet and DTD at all the wrong times but still have girls or vice versa, it’s confusing, scary, and makes us want to give up on swaying all together.
But swaying is so much more complicated than flipping a coin. Swaying isn’t all or nothing, it’s a complicated bunch of physical processes that work together in unpredictable ways we don’t even fully understand, ways that may very well be different in each person.
Perhaps a better way to envision the odds is to picture a die (a die is one of a set of dice, so picture just one dice) with a lot of sides on it. (Anyone who’s ever played the board game Scattergories will know just what I mean, or picture a die somewhat like a soccer ball.). Imagine that each of us carries with us our own personal die that we’re born with, and that die has like 20, 50, 100, or 1000 faces on it. Some of those faces are pink and some are blue, and when we conceive a baby, we roll that die and whatever color comes up on top is the gender we conceive.
Each of the faces on the die corresponds to a different thing that can affect gender. Almost certainly, genetics play a part in gender selection, so some of the faces on the die are colored pink or blue and we cannot change them, these are just traits we are born with. Some people probably have more unchangeable blue faces, some have more unchangeable pink faces, and other people have an equal number of each. It even seems possible that some people have more unchangeable faces overall than others do, and their bodies may just be more hardwired to produce children of mostly one gender than another person’s would be.
But other sides of the die do change color. They flip back and forth depending on variables in our diet, timing, and environment. Sometimes we have more pink faces on our die, and sometimes more blue faces. These are what we are aiming at changing when we sway, to get as many faces as we can to turn pink or blue and keep them there as long as we can while we roll the die.
Some of these faces are easily changed, others are much tougher. Some of the faces are linked together, so changing several at the same time works much better than trying to do only one. In fact, the only way to change some of the faces is by changing enough of the others. Other faces are easy for one person to change but more difficult for others, probably due to genetic factors.
Unfortunately, since we are all born with different dice, we don’t know exactly if what works for one person will always work for another. All we can do is look at what seems to work best for the majority of people over the course of time, and try and emulate that.
Even after the best sway imaginable, there is no way that all of our die’s faces will be pink or blue. There are some faces that are unchangeable, and others that were just too difficult, and still others that we don‘t even know how to change yet. We can do our best to change as many as we can, but there will be at least some chance that the opposite color will come up when we roll. Even if we changed ¾ of our faces pink, ¼ will still be blue. Even in people who are ¾ pink will have boys ¼ of the time.
Most of us only roll our die only 2 or 3 times over the course of our lives. It isn’t hard to imagine that just from sheer bad luck, that some of us will happen to have more blue or pink faces during those times, even if every other month out of our life we had more of the opposite. For others, they may be in that ¼ who rolls blue even though their odds were mostly pink.
You just can’t predict by looking at one or two people, what things work best to sway. Because yes, your friend may eat lots of salt and have girls (sodium has not been proven as a sway tactic, this is just an example), but she may have so many other pink factors that her overall pink odds were still higher. Or for me personally, I DTD before I ovulated, so according to Shettles, I should have daughters. I don’t, but that doesn‘t mean that Shettles is completely wrong in every way and that timing doesn‘t matter (even tho Shettles IS wrong and timing doesn't matter LOL). I simply had more blue factors than I did pink those months, and my roll came up blue.
Only over the course of time, and by watching a lot of people sway (both successes and failures), will we gradually be able to learn what things work best and for who. Until then, we have to accept that there will be exceptions, there will be opposites, and even though there are failed sways, it doesn’t mean that we should give up on swaying and refuse to even try.
