Twins and Swaying?

If Natural Gender Selection is possible, how can twins exist?

Here’s an interesting question I got on Gender Dreaming this past week:

I am so confused - can any one explain for me how can a mother be pregnant with twins boy and girl at the same time

even she has everything identical the same diet and number of attempts and supplements

Does she produce two eggs at different time? But I read here that timing does not sway?

Second question - if a women has twins from one divided egg can they be only girls or boys not to be mixed (girl and boy)?

This is one of those things people secretly wonder. If Natural Gender Selection works, then how can boy and girl twins be a thing?

But I think I need to answer the second question first, to make sure we all understand where twins come from. There are two kinds of twins, fraternal and identical. Fraternal twins come from two different eggs that are fertilized by two different sperm and will be as closely genetically related as siblings. Boy-girl twins are fraternal twins because both an X sperm and a Y sperm need to fertilize two different eggs to make them.

If one embryo (one egg plus one sperm) splits into two AFTER fertilization, then the babies are identical twins and must by definition both be boys or both be girls. The egg cannot split till after fertilization - since it is just one cell. Only after it becomes a small ball of cells can it split to become two balls of cells, that continue dividing to grow into two babies. Because it's fertilization that determines sex, identical twins by definition are the same sex. Even if something goes wrong after that point that makes them LOOK different from one another, even that they’re different sexes, they aren't on the genetic level. Very, very, very rarely, there is a case where one of the twins has an abnormality that affects their sex (so, the Y chromosome in one twin doesn't work right) and so it ~looks~ like one is a boy and one is a girl or vice versa, but at the time the egg divided, they were genetically both boys or both girls.

Now that we understand the difference between identical and fraternal twins, let’s go back and address why it is that fraternal twins can be a boy and a girl, even with swaying. If a mother has the same diet, supplements, number of attempts, how is it that boy-girl twins can be conceived?

The answer is very simple - because Natural Gender Selection isn't 100%!

While we can increase our odds quite dramatically, swaying is simply not a guarantee. If it was, if a few changes in diet and lifestyle made over the span of three to six months could possibly alter the gender ratio 100% of the time, the entire human race would have died out a long time ago. Any isolated tribe or village with a limited diet or particular lifestyle practices would have started to make all boys or all girls! Yet around the world there are NO tribes, ethnic groups, villages, or countries ever found where the gender ratio deviated naturally from about 50-50. While we believe your chances vary by individual and by individual conception, across the population gender ratio settles at roughly 50-50 regardless of diet or lifestyle. That means that swaying simply cannot be 100% effective - otherwise we would have seen some evidence of that happening somewhere in history or in the world, just from sheer random chance. That we don’t, indicates that’s just not how it works.

Even the best sways produce results somewhere between 2/3(66%) -3/4(75%) successful sways depending on the tactics used and how they’re implemented. Please don’t get discouraged by these numbers; what they really mean is that for some of us (especially those with 3+ of the same gender already) we are potentially going from as much as 75% likely to have another of the same gender with our natural lifestyle, to as much as 75% likely to have an opposite. If that is confusing to you, think of it like this: Since we get between 66-75% success rates for both pink and blue, it means that lifestyle changes that ANYONE can do over the course of three months’ time can produce 66-75% of a particular gender in a population of people who are very likely already “set” for opposites - since their day-to-day diet and lifestyle is producing 66-75% of the opposite gender for other people. To go from 70% likely to have a boy to 70% likely to have a girl or vice versa is HUGE and no one should be disappointed in those numbers, not at all. No, they’re not 100%, but 100% is not attainable. These are real world, real life people and better still, this is with an average of three months to conception…no insanely hard sways that cause people to go many months or even years not getting pregnant.

Even if we were to use a theoretical upper window of 80%, which we treat as the imaginary limit of what is possible to get from swaying + natural settings out of our control, that would still mean 20% opposites even under ideal circumstances, which can certainly account for a lot of BG twins.

But it’s more than that. The truth is, of course, most people don't sway. Most people are doing a variety of things, some of which may sway a little pinker, some of which may sway a little bluer, and even though we don’t yet know how it all works, both X and Y sperm are able to make it through all that to have a fairly equal shot at the egg. Imagine if a lady is losing weight but taking a prenatal, how would that sway? Imagine if she was vegetarian but she ate high calories, how would that sway? In every conception - and in MANY MANY conceptions that happen when people have never heard the word “swaying” beyond the wind in the trees - some X and some Y sperm manage to get through to the Fallopian tubes, and then X finds one egg and Y another. Interestingly, there are fewer BG twins than there "should" be according to statistics; this may be down to things that are swaying, or it may be because twin pregnancies seem to be harder on boys than on girls, or a combination of the two plus other things we haven’t even begun to guess at.

Some people out there on the Internet will try to tell you that boy-girl twins prove that Shettles timing works. These people claim that the existence of boy-girl twins means that the boy was conceived with the first egg (presuming as timing aficionados do, sex right at ovulation), and then girl was conceived with a second egg released days later and fertilized by cutoff sperm. Or they’ll say that if a swayer ends up with boy-girl twins, that means they must have had sex twice, once at a cutoff and once at ovulation, and even when the swayer in question insists she only had sex once, she’s treated as if she’s fibbing!

But that simply cannot be true. Timing is NOT the reason for boy-girl twins, it’s biologically impossible. Contrary to popular belief, women who have twins DO NOT make eggs at different times. That is a myth. Most twins, if not ALL of them, come from eggs that are released very close together, separated at most by a few hours. After the first egg is released, the hole the egg comes out of, called the corpus luteum, makes a lot of progesterone that stops other eggs from being released. This happens within hours. So unless the second egg is released fairly soon, it can't be ovulated any more due to that progesterone the corpus luteum makes. It's just impossible that more eggs are released many days later, and it’s even MORE impossible that a second egg could make it to the uterus to implant days later, because that same rising progesterone makes the fluids in your uterus and tubes inhospitable, and that would prevent eggs fertilized later on, from surviving long enough to implant.

I know there are some claims made that babies can be conceived not only days but even weeks or months apart, but they are not true (even if they are made by doctors or are popularized in the media) and are instead a result of one twin growing more slowly than another twin, either because of problems with the placenta or genetic abnormalities, so one twin looks younger when in the womb and birth than it really is.

These twins are identical and so had to come from the same egg, but due to issues with the placenta the twins developed at a different pace and appear different sizes:

These twins are identical and so had to come from the same egg, but one twin did not develop in the same way the other did due to a genetic error that occurred after the point of separation:

It is easy to see how a misinformed doctor, still believing incorrect things they’d been taught 40 years ago in medical school, could mistakenly assume these babies had been conceived at different times. When we can clearly see this wide variation in size and development in identical twins, it becomes pretty obvious that differences in size and development in fraternal twins, who are not genetically identical at conception, are not due to timing or babies being conceived weeks apart. The hormonal cascade of ovulation + conception prevents another pregnancy from happening when a first one has already occurred, unless the second pregnancy happens in a very narrow window.

These guys are my uncles (aren’t they cute??) They are fraternal twins who look nothing whatsoever alike. This happens all the time. Fraternal twins being different sizes does not tell you anything about when they were conceived whatsoever. They are different sizes because their genes are different. My uncles were different sizes at birth and remained different sizes their entire life, and not because they were conceived on different days or in different weeks. It just doesn’t work that way.

Timing has been thoroughly debunked. It is the most widely studied element of Natural Gender Selection that there is, has been extensively scrutinized by very smart people for 50 years now, and if there was anything to it at all, we would all know it and would be able to use it to conceive a baby of our desired gender.

The reason why boy-girl twins are conceived is NOT TIMING. The reason boy-girl twins are conceived is firstly because most people don’t sway and do some things that sway one direction, and some things that sway another direction. But most important, it’s because swaying just isn’t 100%!

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