Baby Gender Swaying

I first heard a legitimate scientific method for increasing the probability of having a baby of a certain gender >10 years ago, I didn't believe it at first so I googled it (ya you could google things >10y ago :-)  From what I could see it seemed legit. As I was going to pass this advice onto a friend recently (who may become a parent in the near future) I thought since 10 years have passed I should try to make sure nobody tweaked or overturned these results...good thing I did because that's exactly what happened!

Turns out this is eponymously named The Shettles Method.  Seems the evidence against it really started piling up in 2006, I checked this maybe 2004 or so...explains why I had no chance to find it! Now, I do want to point out that even if this or some other method worked well it could be an issue if predominantly a country were say to want all boys etc. but the way we wanted to use it is to have a girl first then a boy, which is balanced so I don't see any issue with that.  Clearly since we have 2 wonderful daughters we saw it didn't work the second time, but of course we knew it was only probabilistic (and if it were true, girls would be a higher probability target than boys) so after thinking about it I thought I figured out something that didn't allow us to reach that higher probability.  Of course now I realize that it wasn't going to make a difference anyway.

So if Shettles doesn't work...are there any factors that can influence whether you end up with an XX or an XY?  Most scientist believe there are!  The next question is, OK how can I make use of this fact for gender swaying?  The current answer to that is...it's far from clear :-(

I'm going to point you to some links for further reading, the 1st is a good place to start if you are going to dive deeper into this topic.  I was a bit concerned about the source (I mentioned this before but before you trust anything, especially if you don't have say a scientific background, need to make sure it's a top quality source!) as it's a msg board but they provide legit links to scientific papers to back up their facts.  This will bust or confirm some myths about differences between X & Y sperm, which is ultimately what decides on XX or XY (as eggs are always X).

http://genderdreaming.com/forum/swaying-studies-and-scientific-research/1562-what-real-differences-between-x-sperm-y-sperm.html

Second, this slightly academic article examines different mechanisms (mostly errors either in DNA or in the meiosis process in males) that can cause a higher probability of ending up with an XX or XY baby.

http://sciencequestionswithsurprisinganswers.org/2015/05/05/is-it-completely-random-whether-a-baby-is-a-boy-or-a-girl/

And finally, last but not least a whole group of myths about gender swaying debunked from a top quality source, The Cleveland Clinic!  I want to point out, in fairness to Dr. Shettles that this article should have mentioned his work was from the 1960's!  It was amazing work for that time with the limited technology available to him...of course in 2006 and beyond, tech has come a long way and they can accurately differentiate X & Y sperm...etc so it's easy to see where Shettles went wrong!

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/2014/10/boy-or-girl-can-you-choose-your-babys-gender/

If after all this you are still interested in this topic and want to dig even deeper then I suggest reading more about Capacitation and how it could alter the gender ratio, or this recent theory that is gaining supporters...all these years Doctors said it was the Father who decided whether it's XX or XY but perhaps it's actually the Mother!  The mechanism that could allow this is if a woman's body could somehow differentiate between X or Y sperm...and depending on various factors, decide to favor one over the other!  It sounds a bit crazy but that's what so cool about Science!  Here's the paper showing some evidence of this! How can you make use of this?  You'll have to wait awhile for that as this is bleeding edge research, it's in early stages still...

https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2164-15-293

PS  I nearly forgot, a very interesting tangent here is that with the advances of Biotech, we're getting quite close to same-sex couples being able to have a child that has genetic contribution from both parents.  I'm still learning more about this but I believe it would be easier for 2 Men to have either a boy or a girl since they have both X & Y chromosomes.  What's much trickier is for 2 Women to have a boy (a girl is not that hard as that's just XX, one from each mother...easy peasy ;-) but to have a boy you will need to make a Y sperm from the genetic material of two Mom's.  I have heard this is theoretically possible (I'll need to do more research to understand how) but it's going to take 20 years or so to get that sorted out.

Here's a good link on it, has links inside to less technical News stories on this
https://ipscell.com/2015/03/babysamesexcouple/