Girl Crazy: Women Who Suffer from Gender Disappointment
By Ruth Shalit Barrett | October 09, 2009 2:00 p.m.
When a sonogram showed that Stephanie Lewis, a writer and party planner living in San Diego, was expecting boy-girl twins, she was ecstatic. Lewis, already the mother of a two-year-old son, had always longed for a girl. ?From an early age, I just remember wanting a daughter,? says Lewis, an effervescent brunette who recalls a Pleasantville childhood filled with mother-daughter fashion shows, ballet recitals, and tea parties. ?Now, finally, I was getting her. I was just in heaven.?
Not that the sonographer?s revelation had come as a shock. For this, her second pregnancy, the 28-year-old Lewis had done everything in her power to increase the odds of having a girl. She?d adhered to a strict diet of milk, kefir, berries, and low-salt sesame paste on the premise that X sperm will thrive in a calcium-rich environment. She?d douched with vinegar and slept with a lime-soaked tampon in hopes of lowering her vaginal pH to girl-favorable levels. With her husband?s reluctant assent, Lewis also visited a local sperm-spinning clinic that practices a form of sex selection known as the Ericsson method. In this process, faster-swimming boy-producing sperm are separated from slower swimming girl-producing sperm, yielding a concentrate that is then inserted into the woman?s uterus via artificial insemination.
It took Lewis four tries, each costing $1,500, to become pregnant. Upon hearing the good news?about the girl-boy twins?she went shopping. ?I didn?t buy the boy anything,? she says. Instead she stocked up on pink paraphernalia for her daughter, already named Cassandra. ?I bought her jewelry and a little bracelet with her name on it. I was planning her first Halloween. She was going to be a little ballerina.?
As it turned out, the sonographer had made an error. Lewis got a delivery room surprise: twin boys. ?I was in hysterics. I felt like somebody had died. The nurse had to send over a psychiatric social worker,? she says.
At home with her baby boys and her two-year-old son, Lewis? anguish deepened. She was put on Prozac, but it didn?t help. ?I stayed in my room. I drew the drapes. I felt like a funeral should be held.? The low point was when the twins had to be circumcised. ?I thought, Here we are with two penises when there should not have been two. I got a lot of preaching,? she adds. ?People would say, ?You have two healthy infants. How ungrateful can you be?'"
Family members pointed out the toll her mood was taking on her three young sons, but ?I didn?t want to listen,? Lewis recalls. ?I was in a fog.? She stayed in her room, ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and slept for hours, rousing herself only to shop for ?drop-dead, absolutely adorable? baby boy clothes. ?I hated blue, so I bought mint green,? she says. ?That brought me comfort.?
Lewis? despair began to abate when she went online and, to her astonishment, found chatrooms full of women who were distraught for the same reason she was. Her new friends had screen names such as Dreamofgirlz, Praying4Pink, and PlzBeABoy. On sites like iVillage.com and In-Gender.com, they swapped gender-?swaying? techniques, posted photos of their kids (?This is Carter, who was supposed to be Chance?), and grappled openly with their ?gender disappointment??GD for short. ?I have not stopped crying,? wrote one In-Gender poster. ?I just sit in a daze and contemplate the end of my life.? Wrote another: ?I?ve been in a funk all afternoon and am once again considering terminating this pregnancy.?
Finally, Lewis had a name for what was ailing her. ?For the first time, I felt I wasn?t a bad person for feeling this way. Here was this treasure trove of women who could all commiserate. It was like I was part of a club.?
Gender disappointment is not an official psychiatric diagnosis. It?s an Internet-era label, an appellation coined by women who are bitterly unhappy about their baby?s gender and who can?t get over it, even after their child is born. It?s also a subculture, or, as Lewis says, a club. There are books on GD (Altered Dreams: Living With Gender Disappointment), herbal tonics and tablets intended to influence a child?s sex, and a handful of fertility specialists who have no qualms about taking all the guesswork out of baby making. ?Why not?? asks Jeffery Steinberg, MD, an Encino, California?based reproductive endocrinologist who specializes in the use of in vitro fertilization for sex selection. ?We?re not producing monsters; we?re producing healthy babies.?
Much of the talk on the GD message boards revolves around sex selection methods, ranging from various folk remedies to sperm-sorting and spinning methods (MicroSort, Ericsson) to the holy grail: in vitro fertilization with preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), a technique in which a doctor determines the gender of the embryos and transfers only those that fit the parents? request. The most popular at-home option is the Shettles method, named after the doctor who developed it and involving the exquisite timing of intercourse relative to ovulation. You?ll also see lots of homegrown recipes for conceiving daughters that turn sex into a kind of kinky mad-science experiment: ?Have your [partner] give you a ?sample.? Catch it in a cup or condom. Add warm lime. Do not warm lime in microwave?warm in hot sink. Then layer egg white (with a pH of 9 to 9.9) on top. You then incubate it for an hour?and insert it into yourself with medical syringe. Lay with hips raised.?
Some women go as far as to label their own boys as ?failed sways? or ?Shettles Opposites.? The mother of little Caleb, writing on In-Gender, wants it known that her apple-cheeked son is ?living as a MicroSort statistic?: He is the unexpected result of a 92.9 percent girl sort probability that doctors gave her. The mom of three-year-old Isaac and two-year-old Isaiah, who?s expecting another boy on December 15, has put a frowny-face icon next to her due date. ?I hate my life,? she writes. ?My family is complete in reality but not in my heart.? She is considering giving all three of her boys up for adoption: ?I want to give them to someone who can actually love them.?
It?s easy to dismiss the GD crowd as a bunch of heartless nutcakes. Yet it?s undeniable that a kind of free-floating girl lust has entered the public consciousness.
I experienced it myself several years ago. I loved having a boy. But each time I visited my sister, I found myself drifting through my nieces? rooms, mooning over the high-perched canopy beds and dollhouses and Lip Smackers lined up like little toy soldiers: Watermelon, Grape Crush, Berry Peach.
On impulse, I bought my three-year-old son an expensive Swedish dollhouse, so clean-lined and modern that it could pass for unisex. He removed the furniture, turned it on its side, and found a way of connecting the bed to the armoire and the armoire to the sideboard. ?Look, Mom,? he said. ?A train.?
When I got pregnant for the second time, I really thought I?d be fine with another boy. I tried to picture two little imps playing on the beach in matching Vilbrequin swim trunks. When the doctor?s office called with the results of my amniocentesis, I was drinking root beer and eating takeout pad thai. ?It?s a girl,? they said, and I put down my soda with a thud; I went to Whole Foods and stocked up on fresh veggies, brown rice, and an organic probiotic drink called Berry Green. I felt a sudden surge of tender protectiveness. I felt electrified. It turns out I wasn?t alone in fervently desiring a girl: Seventyone percent of American families who use MicroSort?which is still in clinical trials?want a daughter. The Ericsson method that Lewis used is actually more effective for selecting a boy: about 80 percent, compared with only 74 percent for a girl. But the ratio of girl-to-boy requests is as high as two to one at licensed clinics. ?The era of wanting a first-born male is gone, not to return,? founder Ronald Ericsson, MD, has said.
What?s behind the modern-day girl fetish? One explanation: Women envision a brighter future for their daughters than they do for their sons. Boys are practically the underdogs these days, having fallen behind girls on nearly every measure of academic achievement, from college attendance to high school graduation rates. According to books such as The War Against Boys and Boys Adrift, they are in danger of becoming, as Christina Hoff Sommers has written, ?tomorrow?s second sex.?
?The way society is now?I feel there?s a preference for girls,? says Linda Heithaus, a marine biologist from Hollywood, Florida, who has two sons and is contemplating doing IVF/PGD in the hope of getting a girl. ?They can do everything a boy can do, plus you can dress them up. It?s almost like, to fit in, you need to have one.? Girls, in other words, are boys plus. They can play sports and have careers, and you can dress them in pink and take them to tea at the American Girl café. What?s not to like?
Others link the yearning to women?s belief that they?ll have a richer lifelong relationship with a daughter than a son. ?Families are raised differently these days,? says Kathleen Rein, a New York psychiatrist who specializes in postpartum disorders. ?It?s much more isolating to be a mother. You don?t have your mom and grandmother next door. Women want girls because they want that close female bond they?re not getting in other parts of their life.?
Consider Cynthia Zierhut, a clinical and developmental psychologist at UC Davis. Five years ago, after giving birth to her third son, Zierhut turned to MicroSort. ?My desire for a daughter is not about pink or shopping. I don?t get manicures and pedicures. All that stuff isn?t important to me. Relationships are. As a woman, I have so much I want to share.?
Zierhut, who is 40, has undergone two failed MicroSorts in the past year. Now she?s pinning her hopes on ovulation timing and various at-home swaying methods, including the restrictive girl diet. ?Lately, I?m just so sick of it,? she says. But she?s reluctant to give up. ?I am a little bit obsessed. The minute I started pursuing this, I pursued it in the manner that I?ve pursued every single thing in my life that I thought I could obtain. And that just feeds on itself.?
Facebook
Twitter