I thank all the people for the data. Most of it was of super quality. Gabriela is the most complete and relevent. Anybody with additional input should feel free to post. Thanks for the good information dopers.
A couple of times lately I’ve heard the “fifth chromosome” referred to in literature and film. An anomaly with it results in a transgendered person?? Could someone explain this to me in simple terms?
Rather extreme but you could move into a war zone. Birth rates in war zones are heavily skewed towards males IIRC.
I can come at the question from a slightly different angle, that of a practicing herbalist. And still the answer is “no”. Nothing that I have ever heard of is anywhere near strong enough to change the gender of a fetus. It’s technically an itty bitty possibility that back in cavewoman days there existed such a plant that is now extict, but if so, it didn’t last long enough for writing to be invented. Krateus, Dioscoredes, Pliny, Gerard, Culpepper - all the way down to our dear Mrs. Grieves, all write of methods using herbs we still have around today, including things like bull’s testicles and asparagus, vitex and wild yam. Nothing that they wrote about has changed much over the centuries, and the information has never been truly “lost.” But it doesn’t work, either.
You can be assured that hundreds of women ate nothing *but *bull’s testicles during pregnancy, and still had girls. Poor Henry might have had an easier time (not to mention his wives) if such things really worked.
(And to answer the other hijack - those things that you can try BEFORE conception to sway the odds - my husband and I decided to try timing our intercourse for several days before ovulation to better our odds of a girl, and it worked. Technically, I shouldn’t even have been able to conceive, because it was 6 days before ovulation, and sperm, according to the textbook, live only 3-4 days in the uterus. Tell that to my daughter! The theory is that X sperm are bigger, heavier and slower, and take longer to get up to the ovum. Y sperm are smaller and faster, but die sooner. So if you have sex and there’s no egg to be found, all the males get lost, refuse to stop for directions, and die before the egg is released. The females, having packed a nice hearty lunch, checked Mapquest twice and made a leisurely stroll up the uterus, are the only ones left to fertilize the egg when it’s finally released.)
I’d have to see a cite for this. Male fetuses are much more fragile and easily miscarried than females, and I’d expect the stress of living in a warzone would give you more females surviving pregnancy. But this is a WAG, and I’m ready to be proved otherwise.
So, if you want to better your odds of having a boy, one would time intercourse for right at ovulation?
Right before, actually. You need to give the little swimmers a day or so to get through the uterus and into the fallopian tubes, where fertilization actually happens. If you wait until you ovulate, most often the egg will make it into the uterus before the sperm reach her, and then fertilization, while still possible, is much less likely.
I know, of course, of the Greater Lips, and I presume that “ours” refers to “women”, not to “humans”, but the rest of the Latin in that sentence is figuratively Greek to me. Would you mind translating, gabriela?
And WhyNot this being, after all, the Straight Dope, I feel obliged to point out that you don’t know that timing your intercourse actually “worked”. Even if it hadn’t worked, you’d have still had a 50-50 chance of having a girl. You’d need dozens or hundreds of data points to be able to say that the method actually works. Note, by the way, that I’m not actually doubting you; it’s quite possible that those dozens or hundreds of data points do exist in a study somewhere, and even if such a study doesn’t exist, it’s quite possible that the method still works, and we just don’t know it.
Why in the world would you tell her that she was a man?
I want to point out for the people that keep saying the chance of a birth being 50-50 is not actual, but a WAG. It’s not like the man has an equal number of each sperm, that are all evenly matched in the race to fertilize.
Dunno, but the modern advice is tell all. You probably wouldn’t say “You are a man” - that’s way too blunt and straightforward for most docs. You would say “Your cells are XY and not XX,” and wait until her distressed mom said “But what does that mean,” and embark on a long roundabout explanation while the distressed teen ran from the room. You would end up saying basically the same thing.
Sorry, Chronos. I get carried away. You know the letters SDSAB under your name give me a little scare like the principal just spoke to me, don’t you?
The “ours” was indeed women. We don’t have medical English to blame for that.
Also, there aren’t good names in plain English for most of these features. Everyone knows “clit” for clitoris, and we have “man in a boat” for it too, very expressive little metaphor that. But I don’t know a nonmedical word for “gubernaculum” or “labia minora”.
The “gubernaculum”, or “governor”, as in the sense of tutor and kid-watcher, is a long rope of fibrous tissue that precedes the testis down the canal from the place where it starts, into the scrotum. The fantasy of the anatomists who named it several centuries ago was that it led the testis on the right route. Seeing it hand in hand with the testis, wisely governing its descent, I suppose.
In women, we still have the long rope, but it goes into the labia and stops in the dermis - in the opaque underlayer of the skin, beneath the transparent outer layer. If we hear about something such as would make a man’s testicles suddenly draw up closer to his body, which is called the “cremasteric reflex”, we can get a little shuddery moment while we feel a drawing effect in our labia. The gubernaculum and the cremasteric muscle (which works in men to pull the testicles up) are combining to give us a feeling in our labia like you would get in your scrotum.
Nuf sed?
It doesn’t strike me that someone like that is a man. In fact, I thought that medical science pretty much agreed that transgendered individuals were the gender they identified as. It seems to me that someone who identifies as female and has had female genitalia from birth (even if the innards aren’t quite right) is female, even if she has testes and XY genes. It just seems not only insensitive but really hard to reasonably justify to claim she’s male.
OK, I can see your point. I don’t really know what medical science agrees on with regard to transgendered individuals, and having one in my family, I would never hurt one out of malice or ill will. I suppose the word “man” sprang from my own overactive mind. Chalk it up to my desire to turn a striking phrase. Teachers like me can be like that. No personal injury intended, Harpo.
Do realize that I will never be in a position to tell anyone this, any more than you will. So my excessive wording will never be used. What wording is actually used, I don’t know. We could ask active family docs on the board what words they use / would use.
Someone above mentioned House, and Dr. House actually did say pretty much that in a recent episode. So I’ve had time to think about it. My reaction was pretty much “What the hell?”
Your bedside manner might conceivably be just as bad as Dr. House’s, but at least you have an excuse. Your patients probably wouldn’t be terribly distressed if you told them that.
Mrs Princhester and I looked into this a few years back. I think I may even have asked a question on the 'dope about it. There is not a single study that shows that any of these methods work at all.
Mrs Princhester borrowed a book on the subject that made myriad assertions about the efficacy of the methods it espoused (which sound much like WhyNot’s) but backed it up with not a single footnote or reference to any proper study. It backed it up with testimonials from people who had the sex of child they wanted after using these methods.
But as long as there are people in the world who will think something worked because they got what they wanted, even though random chance would have got them that 50% of the time, there’s a buck to be made by someone, I guess.
Sure, absolutely. The method is called “The Shettles Method”, and Dr. Shettles claims a 80-90% success rate for choosing boys and a 75-80% rate for girls. These numbers have been disputed. There are studies on both sides of the fence.
This is why I was careful to phrase my response in terms of “Theory”, not “proven scientific fact”. Thank you for further clarifying that position.
Sure, absolutely. The method is called “The Shettles Method”, and Dr. Shettles claims a 80-90% success rate for choosing boys and a 75-80% rate for girls. These numbers have been disputed. There are studies on both sides of the fence.
This is why I was careful to phrase my response in terms of “Theory”, not “proven scientific fact”. Thank you for further clarifying that position.
By the way, I’ve seen several references in this thread to the fact that there’s a 50/50 split between males and females born. This is not the case. The overall ratio is slightly over 51% males born (or so I often hear, but can’t find a US cite at the moment. Here’s one from New Zealand.), but in some populations, the numbers are far more skewed. One study showed that “It was found that in patients below 35 years of age, 62.7% of births were males and in patients above 35 years of age 71.4 were female.” cite.
Well, The X chromosome is much larger than the Y chromosome, which means that the male sperm will travel faster. Female sperm make up for this by living longer.
So if you want a male, you could have sex short before ovulation. Or perhaps do something that slows down all sperm. Not sure if this would work
lol, compunds don’t get much more carbohydrate than ol’ glucose.