The Magic Bullet, the Light Switch, the Radio Dial, and the Sieve

(if you don’t know what a sieve is, it’s also called a colander or a pasta strainer)

The traditional approach to Natural Gender Selection and gender swaying has been that of the Magic Bullet and the Light Switch. We are told that our bodies have well-defined, easily changed settings and you can, in effect, flip a switch where you go from conceiving ALL one gender to being guaranteed the other. As easy as turning off and on a light switch – flip, flip, off/on, boy/girl, guarantee/failure – no in-between. Whether it’s from minerals, hormones, pH, ions, month of conception, or some combination of them all, your body/your egg is just irrevocably SET to make boys or girls and if you can’t change that setting, you’re DOOMED to continue having ONLY that gender.

The only way to change that setting, we’re told, is by flipping your inner light switch from “girl” to “boy” or vice versa. And the way that you flip that switch is by shooting Magic Bullets at it. Altering your mineral levels, your hormone levels, TTC in a certain month, making sure your pH falls into a certain range…if you take enough shots with the magic bullets, you’ll flip your light switch from boy to girl and be guaranteed a child of a particular gender. Using this logic, if your sway fails it’s because your aim was bad (you did the sway “factors” wrong or didn’t do them hard enough) or you didn’t take enough shots (didn’t do all the “factors”) or took aim at the wrong target (you didn’t use some revolutionary method of gender swaying that certain parties would only be too happy to sell you for hundreds of dollars). Or even because something is fundamentally wrong with your gun or your switch and it’s just hopeless for you to ever even try to conceive a baby of your desired gender.

Pretty depressing really. A lot of self-doubt, blame, guilt, feelings of failure, and hopelessness involved with that paradigm. Like walking a tightrope over a pool of ravenous sharks, one slip and all is lost. It’s no wonder that swaying messes with our minds when we think about it in such a desperate, black and white way.

But what if it doesn’t work that way?

What if swaying is more like a sieve – meaning, you can thin out the ranks and help out your team a bit thru swaying but some opposites are ALWAYS going to sneak thru the holes? And the overall goal of swaying is to tighten or loosen the holes in your sieve to let pass, or basically, to weed out as many swimmers of a particular gender as you can?

When you shoot a Magic Bullet at a Light Switch you can change it from on to off, pink to blue, but when you shoot even the most magical of bullets at a sieve, the best you can do is make another hole in your sieve. It may be a little bit bigger than the other holes but it’s only just another hole.

“Well, that’s all good right?” some might say. “I’ll just shoot a lot of holes at my sieve and even if it’s not a guarantee I still have a really good chance at my DG. The stricter a sway I do, the better! Even if they don’t work, at least I tried it.”

And that would work if we were talking about a real sieve, but of course we aren’t. We’re talking about a living system that can change itself and heal itself; a sieve that can grow its own holes or repel bullets as effectively as Superman’s chest, or stop working all together if it doesn’t “like” being shot at. In short, the bullets aren’t magic, but the sieve itself kinda is.

The human body is a weird and wonderful thing and it has ways of compensating for the things we put it through. Example, when we take high doses of vitamins and minerals, we just pee more of them away. When we avoid them, our body robs them from our bones and teeth and stored body reserves and the levels in our body never change at all. When we squirt acidic jellies/douches or baking soda up our wazoo, we make more neutral CM to compensate to wash it away and neutralize it. Taking herbs to increase testosterone can cause your body to stop making estrogen and progesterone and vice versa. Fire away, Magic Bullets…at the end of it all The Sieve does only what it wants to do.

Worse, as many pink swayers have learned to their dismay, there’s such a thing as too many bullets. If The Sieve senses that it’s under assault (and this can happen not only from things we are doing to sway, but bullets which are already flying from every angle already – age, stress, a cold virus, chemicals in the environment, your boss running you ragged at work, sleepless nights spent with a teething baby) it will just close up and not let ANYTHING through, meaning you can sway so hard that you render yourself incapable of pregnancy. It’s like a scene from a heist movie where our heroes go to great lengths to sneak into a building and past the security system only to have a giant unbreakable metal door come crashing down to seal everything shut.

“Hold on wait what? I think I liked the light switch paradigm better! If nothing I do really matters anyway and it all comes down to luck and things my body is doing all on its own in the end, at least with the light switch I can feel like I have some control, even if I don’t.”

Obviously I do think there are many things you can do to sway gender or else I’d take up crochet. Thinking of gender swaying as a sieve instead of a light switch is actually going to HELP you get your DG, because pink swayers, trying to control every miniscule thing in your environment (i.e. shooting round after round of magic bullets wildly and hoping to hit the right target) is going to send your T levels (or whatever it is that is swaying via personality, since we are no longer sure it’s testosterone) skyrocketing. And blue swayers, feeling that you have to get everything perfect every second of every day but falling short, can be so overwhelming that it can lower your T levels (or whatever it is that is swaying via personality, since we are no longer sure it’s testosterone) and make you feel like giving up.

If you do get an opposite, you don’t have to feel consumed with guilt over not including the Chinese Gender Predictor in your sway plan or the time you snarfed two bites of your toddler’s cheeseburger or sipped their vanilla milkshake when they were off playing in the McDonald’s Playland. If your sway doesn’t work out, it IS NOT YOUR FAULT.

It’s a lot more laid back and forgiving an approach to swaying. Instead of firing magic bullets at a tiny and difficult to hit light switch, instead we’re going to use our inner Radio Dial that we ALL have to adjust our sieve in a more girl friendly or boy friendly direction. Imagine a radio dial, think of how it works. It’s not a sudden change like flipping a switch is, it’s a very very gradual thing. It takes time and lots of gentle turning to get all the way across the dial, and there’s LOTS of ground to cover in between. If you stop turning the dial in the middle, or even turn it back a little bit, you don’t undo everything. And if you turn too far and miss your mark, you just go back a little bit in the other direction.

If it’s your anniversary and you eat a steak, you don’t have to start over again with 6 weeks of diet . Looking around at the rest of the world getting boys and girls without even trying, does it really even make SENSE that you should have to do that?? NONE of them are!! How many people do we all know who were working right from the TTC a Boy playbook and have all girls, amirite?

And if you aren’t getting pg with a strict sway, no worries, drop a sway tactic or two (not everything) and you’ll turn the Radio Dial back in the opposite direction without fear that you’re going to flip suddenly from conceiving only one gender, immediately into conceiving only the other gender. I’ve seen SO MANY people throw up their hands after several BFN’s and say, “well that’s it, I can’t get pregnant swaying” and then drop everything and get an opposite…all because they think swaying is a light switch and assume that if they can’t do everything, they may as well do nothing. It’s FINE to drop one or two sway tactics and continue with a sway. You’re turning a dial, not flipping a switch.

This approach also helps weed out sway tactics that probably work vs. those that probably don’t. If you see something online that sounds like a light-switch solution and promises a 95% success rate (and costs $500) you can pretty safely assume that it doesn’t work, that someone is being dishonest or is mistaken somewhere along the line, and you should hang onto that money for baby clothes or college funds. There ain’t gonna be a 95% success rate EVER (without medical intervention). If there were, there would be some tribe out there somewhere dining on tarantulas and fern fiddles with a seriously skewed gender ratio. Yet people everywhere have about 50-50 boys and girls on diets and with lifestyles of almost endless variety.

Unlike the Magic Bullet paradigm, with the Sieve and the Radio Dial there are no right and wrong, must-do must-don’t methods. You don’t load your gun with pH, minerals, ions, hormones, timing, biorhythms, praying every moment that your powder stays dry and your aim is true. If you fall a little short one day, no worries, there’s always tomorrow. Your radio dial is NOT going to shoot from pink to blue or vice versa, in one meal, day, or even week. If you don’t feel comfortable with a sway tactic like douching, if your husband won’t sway and you can’t do abstain, that’s completely totally 100% OK. You can use other methods to turn down your dial. If all you want to or are able to do is a slight change in diet and a blob of Acijel or Preseed, that is STILL a sway and has just as much a chance of succeeding (and possibly more, given that control freakishness sways strongly blue) as the swayer who is miserable, on the edge of divorce, hunting down every possible magic bullet and feeling that if they leave out a single thing no matter how silly, biologically implausible, or disruptive to their life, that their sway will fail.

Perhaps best of all, by keeping true to the reality that there are no magic bullets and there is no light switch, it enables us to get pregnant more quickly. Rather than “do everything possible no matter how long it takes” just “do what I can do and get pregnant because if I don’t get pregnant I have NO chance at my desired gender.”

Some may claim they will go until menopause without having another baby at all if it means they can have the “perfect” sway, but the fact is that even the best sways produce opposites and going many months, even years without conceiving in a hunt for “perfection”, is NOT a rational approach. People have swayed for 2 years and conceived opposites. People have swayed so long they became infertile due to age and ended up with no baby. If you need a guarantee, go high tech, do IVF/PGD, and we have a lot of information available at Gender Dreaming if you need help getting started with that process. What we are doing here is swaying, not guaranteeing, and strict sways are no guarantee anyway.

Life is short and the window in which we can conceive is very, very small…gone in the blink of an eye. When I was swaying for my 4th baby on the InGender site, I was with a group of ladies who were trying to do very strict sways and many of them were not getting pregnant doing so. I know some thought I was a fool for doing a more relaxed sway and I’m sure there was some snickering when I conceived an opposite. But by doing that, I had TIME to try again and got my daughter in the end. If I had thrown away even a few months questing for “perfection” I very well still may have conceived an opposite (there are plenty of “perfect” sways that didn’t work out to prove this) and I would not have DD today. Even if you’re SURE this is your last child, well…you just never know what the future holds – I thought I had had my last child 27 years ago and now I have three more besides. Don’t waste time chasing an imaginary guarantee, because you never know when it’s your last fresh egg in the carton.

At the end of it all, swaying cannot offer guarantees. Swaying is what it is – like the trees swaying in the wind, it’s gently pushing in a certain direction. Even the best sways can fail – some Y’s can make it through a pink sieve and vice versa – and if you cannot even entertain the idea of an opposite, then swaying is not for you and you should pursue IVF/PGD. If you can accept that possibility, then swaying can be a great way to help turn that radio dial and increase your odds. But don’t go looking for magic bullets or light switches – it just doesn’t work that way.

Questions? Join our community at Gender Dreaming, where I’m available to answer all your questions about Natural Gender Selection!

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