Symptoms and gender...

[Happymommy1987]

Hi... I know people can have two totally different pregnancies and be carrying the same gender... but of those of you who have had boy and girl, did you feel anything different in the weeks 6ish on...?



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[missiz]

hey there, I have carried both a boy and a girl and my pregnancies were very different. Both my boys I didnt get even one day of morning sickness, I felt pretty good really and had a very relaxed easy going mood. My last pregnancy was with my daughter and I got morning sickness, had horrible mood swings and anger issues, just felt seedy in general lol and with this pregnancy (I havent found out what I am having yet) I have morning sickness (possibly worse than my daughters pregnancy) and I just feel crap, I get headaches, dizzy, food aversions, bad after tastes, no energy, and having the same issues with mood swings and anger

I know there is plenty of evidence out there saying that pregnancy symptoms arent gender related and LOTS of women who debunk it with their personal experiences, but there are some that have experiences where gender appears to relate to the way their bodies handle the pregnancy.

[atomic sagebrush]

But let's say for the sake of argument that 25% of people really do have different symptoms for different genders. That STILL MEANS that symptoms don't predict gender. Even though some people believe it worked for them, unless it works for everyone, all the time, in every case, then it doesn't work (because something that doesn't work for most people, doesn't reliably work!) and telling people it may work sometimes and not other times simply is setting people up for disappointment.

I am never saying "symptoms don't predict gender" to doubt anyone's word or to discount their experiences. I'm not trying to prevent you guys from telling other people that it worked for you. But I just have to be the party pooper who comes along to spoil the party because I have seen 123,456,789 people who had their hearts stomped on by people - totally innocent, well meaning people - telling them "oh yes that was totally true for me".

It creates so much false hope and false despair. When I got pregnant with my 3rd I did not have ANY gender preference at all. I just wanted a baby after 13 years. But the darn symptoms and old wives tales told me again and again it's a girl, it's a girl, and it was a different pregnancy than my first two (drastically, shockingly different) that it was easy to believe it. And when I heard boy it was like he had come and killed my girl I was supposed to be having! It sucked and I would do ANYTHING to prevent that from happening to another person.

Symptoms do not predict gender. It is impossible for them to predict gender because the Y chromosome is dormant and not making testosterone till the end of the first trimester (by which point most women's symptoms are clearing up). And while girl pregnancies have more HCG on average than boy pregnancies do, many people do not experience any different symptoms from even sky high HCG levels and it is only an average, with a lot of overlap between the two (it's like height - there can be short men or tall women and most people fall in the midrange anyway). There is just no known reliable mechanism for girl pregnancies to cause any different symptoms than boy pregnancies during the first trimester.

Now to share my experience, I have had 5 pregnancies. My first, I had morning sickness in the morning only and threw up every day. My second, I had barely any sickness at all, felt great! (if he'd have been a girl, I would have for sure thought it was gender related, it was so very different). My third, I was horribly nauseous all day, had weeklong migraines, felt so tired I couldn't even drive by myself because I'd doze off, a horrible taste in my mouth and everywhere I went, I smelled really bad odors no one else could smell. With my 4th, I was slightly less nauseous (still plenty nauseous) but I had diarrhea all day long for three months which was really among the more awful pregnancy symptoms I've ever had. Then with my 5th pregnancy, my girl, I felt very much like I did with my second pregnancy - which was a BOY - except I had some food aversions, was a little dizzy a few times and had the bad taste in my mouth again.

That's right - my two similar pregnancies were different genders, and my 3 other pregnancies were all very different from each other. It could easily have been that my two similar pregnancies just happened to be girls, and the others were boys...or vice versa. The thing everyone must keep in mind is that women have shockingly different pregnancies having the exact same gender - and no one knows why! Why was I only dizzy with one pregnancy? Why did I have such a terrible time with DS 4 in the bathroom all day and not the others? Why did I only throw up with DS 1? I don't know - no one knows - and at least for me it really doesn't seem to be correlated to anything other than random chance.

Now, again, I know there are some of you who believe this worked for you and that's totally cool. You know your own body. But for those who are reading all this and thinking that anyone's experience tells you anything reliable about the gender of your baby, and are now getting super sad or super happy, please don't. Take all the people who think it worked for them and set them aside, compare to the people who say it didn't work for them, and even if it's 50-50 it still simply cannot be reliable because there is no guarantee that it will work for you!