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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2561 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for May 29, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I was filling out a form last night which asked for some demographic information about me.

  • Sex:
    • Male
    • Female
    • Intersex
    • Prefer not to say
    • Not known

???

Well, are you going to keep us in suspense which you ticked?

I'd prefer not to say. ;)

Is this a form that might plausibly be filled out by a social worker on someone's behalf, while they aren't present?

Definitely not.

Defensive measure against the crazies. It's easier to put a couple more lines in the form than to fend off a never-ending stream of offended individuals with a lot of free time (they always have a lot of free time) and zero common sense (they always have zero common sense). What a time to live in.

I thought of that, but I really cannot imagine how that isn't already adequately covered by "prefer not to say".

It's for the AI agents filling out the form?

It’s possible (until puberty, alternatively one can be extremely stupid)

If we don't collect the data we'll never understand the statistical sigificance of people who don't know their own sex.

I'm reminded of some sort of social justice guideline for gender inclusivity in forms that I read in the mid 2010s that said that it was a harmful bias or something to imply that there was only a finite number of genders. This, of course, is a statement of fact that there exists at least one human who has infinite genders, since there are only a finite number of humans who exist, and if each one only has a finite number of genders, then the number of genders is, at most, the sum of products of only finite numbers, which is also finite. I'm not sure if I've run into this mythical being yet, though there have been candidates.

Well, there could be an infinite number of potential genders, though not all of them yet instantiated. If genders can be generated on-demand (which as I understand is a basic premise of gender theory) then a simple diagonal procedure makes it not only infinite, but potentially uncountable number of genders. The question whether the cardinality of gender set is larger than the cardinality of continuum is unclear - I think there's a combined math-gender-theory PhD lurking in there somewhere.

This, of course, is a statement of fact that there exists at least one human who has infinite genders, since there are only a finite number of humans who exist, and if each one only has a finite number of genders, then the number of genders is, at most, the sum of products of only finite numbers, which is also finite.

Have you considered that people can change their gender arbitrarily often? And that genders don't need to be instantiated in a human to exist, because they exist in the realm of platonic forms until people discover them? You chud.

Fair point on the chuddiness and the lack of requirement of instantiation. That's a level of postmodernism than even I thought possible.

But for the other point, there's arbitrarily often and there's arbitrarily often. Given the limits of biology, I don't think it's possible for a human to change genders in a literally infinitely small amount of time, and, as such, however often a human were to change their/xir/zir/etc gender in their/xir/zir/etc finite lifespan, it would only sum up to a finite number. As such, all that does is to have another finite number to be multiplied by, which means the result is still finite.

Government trap for the Ayys.

You know how some individuals have a certain silhoutte and hairstyle that makes it hard to tell? Maybe that happens in the mirror too sometimes.

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