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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2025 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

???

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.

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