When Christina Kattula, a 31-year-old yoga teacher in Michigan, was ready to start a family in 2024, she hoped for a son. Her husband “wanted a boy to bond with,” she told me. “And if we had girls later, he thought it would be cute to have a protective-big-brother-type thing.” Kattula decided to try something she’d heard about on a podcast: the so-called Babydust Method. The theory, which was first laid out in a self-published book from 2016, claims, contrary to scientific evidence, that couples can influence their baby’s sex by precisely timing when they have intercourse. Why not try it? she thought. What’s the harm if it doesn’t work? Kattula and her husband followed the book’s advice, and she became pregnant with a boy.
During her pregnancy, Kattula posted a TikTok to her few hundred followers recommending the book to other couples. “Blessed either way,” she said in the video. “But it worked for us. If you’re on your last kid and you’re really, really trying for something, read The Babydust Method.”
She’s one of many women on TikTok and elsewhere on social media who credit Babydust with helping them conceive a child of their preferred sex. Some acknowledge that the method is scientifically unfounded, while other posters are more credulous: In one video, Julie Wise, a mom of two in Massachusetts, said that it’s “not like a fact; I’m pretty sure it’s just like a theory,” but that she is nevertheless “kind of a believer.” In Wisconsin, a day-care owner and mom of four named Courtney Raspor said the method has something like a “90 percent success rate.” Some go a step beyond what the book recommends, into the realm of the woo: In Australia, Faye Briotti said that in addition to timing when she had sex, she also kept pink crystals and salt by her bed, and painted her nails pink. A woman named Reagan, who’d had two boys and was hoping for a girl, said that she got rid of all her baby boy clothes, “because I really wanted to put out into the universe that I wanted a girl.”
The rise of TikTok and other social-media platforms has given audiences ready access to folk-science life hacks of all kinds. People can now more quickly find vertical videos about scientifically suspect practices such as mouth-taping and cortisol-lowering than they can make a doctor’s appointment to address snoring or weight gain. Conceiving and carrying a pregnancy—high-stakes experiences that are full of uncertainty—seem to make some women unusually susceptible to dubious strategies.
Kathryn Taylor, the author of The Babydust Method, got the idea when she was preparing to conceive her first child. She wanted to see if she could increase her odds of having a boy—she thought her husband would be more excited about the baby if it was. She is not a medical doctor and doesn’t have a Ph.D.; she has a bachelor’s degree in microbiology, immunology, and molecular genetics, and now works in pharmaceutical sales. But she knew that an embryo’s sex is determined by the sperm that takes part in creating it: If the sperm carries a Y chromosome, the embryo will be a boy; if it has an X chromosome, the embryo will be a girl. And so she wondered if she could encourage a Y-bearing sperm to fertilize her egg.
She read studies about reproduction on PubMed, a medical database, and came away believing that, after a man and woman have sex, Y sperm undergo an activation process called capacitation faster than X sperm do, but that they also deteriorate sooner. Therefore, she posited, having sex as close as possible to the day the woman ovulates should give boy sperm the best chance of getting to the egg first. By the same logic, having sex a few days before ovulation would allow the boy sperm time to die off before the egg arrives, and increase the likelihood that an X sperm will fertilize the egg.
Sandra Carson, an ob-gyn and reproductive endocrinologist at Yale who has written about sex-selection efforts since the 1980s, and Michael Zinaman, a reproductive endocrinologist in New York, told me that X and Y sperm don’t move or activate at different rates, that one doesn’t live longer than the other, and that the timing or frequency of intercourse does not determine the fetus’s sex.
Taylor told me she was “100 percent” sure the method was going to work for her. As she writes in her author bio, she had “a boy first and a girl second, just like she planned.” She decided to write the book, she told me, after a few moms who had “three boys or whatever” asked her how she had managed to get one child of each sex, and after she shared her tips, she said, they were successful too. She set out to create a short, readable guide—the Kindle version of Babydust is 82 pages long—to help other women. Taylor has claimed that the method works about 87 percent of the time; more than 50,000 people now belong to a Babydust Method Facebook group, which requires proof of book purchase—$10 on Amazon—to join.
When I asked Taylor about Carson and Zinaman’s research, she stuck by her theory. She told me that doctors might not understand the method because they work with patients rather than researching sperm. (Carson has researched sperm extensively.) Taylor emphasized that she thinks a crucial difference between X and Y sperm is their capacitation, and even if that’s proved wrong, she said, it “doesn’t debunk the theory.” It would just mean, she believes, that male and female sperm are distinct in a way “that’s microscopic, that’s genetic, and it’s deep inside the cell.”
Attempts to naturally influence a baby’s sex have a long history. Hippocrates believed that having intercourse immediately after a woman’s period would increase the odds of conceiving a son; doing so “a good while” later, he thought, would favor a girl. In the 1960s, an ob-gyn named Landrum Shettles hypothesized that Y sperm are faster but more fragile, and that to conceive a boy, a couple should have sex as close to ovulation as possible. The following decade, a public-health researcher named Elizabeth Whelan proposed entirely different advice: that couples seeking to conceive a boy should have sex four to six days before ovulation. Babydust is the updated, Millennial-pink gloss on some of these old ideas. In her book, Taylor argues that although the essence of the Shettles method is correct, the science behind it was wrong.
The reality is that none of these ideas are proved to work, and neither is Babydust. At least, they don’t have a better success rate than the 50 or so percent chance a couple has of conceiving either a boy or girl anyway. Zinaman said that if techniques such as Babydust were sound, ob-gyns and fertility doctors would tell patients about them. But, he said, “we don’t have anything we can use to assist patients that way.” The only process that can guarantee having a boy or a girl is in vitro fertilization, which allows parents-to-be to choose the sex of the embryo that gets transferred into the mother. (American doctors are allowed, but not encouraged, to offer IVF for non-medically-necessary sex selection.)
This is now such settled science that the most recent definitive study on the topic is from 1995, when researchers recruited 221 women who wanted to become pregnant, tracked their hormones and dates of intercourse, and found that “the timing of sexual intercourse in relation to ovulation has no influence on the sex of the baby.” The author of that study, Allen Wilcox, who once led the Reproductive Epidemiology Group at the National Institutes of Health, told me that no further studies have been conducted about these methods because “you can’t get a paper published saying there’s no association, because every scientist knows that.”
One reason some people might believe that Babydust is worth trying, despite the lack of evidence, is that it offers a sense of control. All the stages of bringing a baby into the world—trying to conceive, being pregnant, delivering the child, caring for a newborn—can inspire magical thinking in some parents, precisely because so much is out of their hands. One study of hundreds of women undergoing fertility treatments found that 40 percent of them performed a good-luck ritual on the day of their procedure; another, of pregnant Jewish women in Israel, found that they scrupulously avoided buying baby furniture before the baby’s birth in order to avoid “tempting fate.”
When my son was still breech at 37 weeks of pregnancy—when most babies have already flipped into the head-down birthing position—my ob-gyn recommended a website of the most batty methods imaginable to get him to rotate. This is how I, a skeptical science writer, found myself standing on my head in a swimming pool one morning and having a “heart to heart” with my fetus about the importance of turning. (This did not work.) It doesn’t help that the first question people typically ask a mother-to-be—Are you having a boy or girl?—is something she has no power over.
Many Babydust adherents with whom I spoke and whose videos I watched didn’t seem to believe in Babydust as much as they wanted to believe in something. “People are hoping to alter fate,” Zinaman said, “and half the time it alters fate and they’re happy, and the other half, Oh well, it was never 100 percent anyway.”
It can’t hurt to try was something I heard often. Raspor, the Wisconsin day-care owner who used Babydust to conceive a girl, told me, “There’s no way to know whether it was the method or simply chance,” but, “I personally don’t see the harm in giving it a try, as long as you understand that there are no guarantees.”
At other points in history, and in certain cultures, many parents hoped for a boy rather than a girl. Today, though, that broad preference seems to have shifted. The Economist reported last year that American and some European couples who have a girl first are more likely to stop at one child than couples who have a boy first, and that adoptive parents are willing to pay a premium for a girl. Taylor told me that, according to nonrepresentative surveys she’s conducted, two-thirds of her method’s practitioners are hoping to conceive a girl. Thus, another factor likely playing a “huge role” in this trend is sex preference, Brittany Stahnke Joy, a social-work professor at East Tennessee State University, told me. Although precise numbers aren’t available, Stahnke Joy estimates that 30 to 40 percent of expectant parents at some point experience a strong desire for a certain gender and some sadness if they find out they’re having the other.
The women I spoke with seemed to sense that they’re not supposed to have sex preferences. Wise, the mom and content creator in Massachusetts, used Babydust when conceiving her daughter three years ago, after learning about it on a pregnancy-app discussion board. “Obviously, a healthy baby is the main goal,” she told me, “but we can’t deny that we do have preferences sometimes.” Kattula, the Michigan yoga teacher, expressed misgivings about the concept of trying to influence a child’s sex, even though she was pleased to be having a boy. “Is it effed-up to pick and choose what you think the gender of your kids should be?” she said. “I don’t know.”
A number of desires might motivate sex preferences and gender disappointment, Stahnke Joy said: With their child, a parent might hope to recreate themselves, or a relationship with their father or mother; or they might look forward to certain activities that they can imagine doing only with either a daughter or a son. Most of the time, she said, these feelings resolve once the baby is born, but “some people have a lot more children just to try to get the girl.”
This is partly why, as much as I know Babydust doesn’t work, I also understand wanting to believe. When I was pregnant, I initially wanted a girl. I thought girls were smarter and more verbal, their games were more imaginative, and they were better behaved, even though intellectually I realized this was not always true. I wanted to play Fairy Princess Unicorns instead of Garbage Trucks.
Two and a half years later, I do play an awful lot of Garbage Trucks. I sometimes get jealous when I see a toddler girl sitting patiently at storytime while my son, Evan, runs wildly around the room. But Evan has also upended some of my expectations about gender: He is very talkative, has a great sense of humor, and is extremely smart. He loves stories and singing, and even getting dressed up occasionally. I sometimes wonder if, had I gotten my wish and conceived a girl, my hypothetical daughter would have any of those traits or interests. I realize that I don’t care, because I love my son exactly the way he is. Maybe the true magic dust of parenthood is that your baby will surprise you, no matter what their sex turns out to be.
