Thoughts Over Catnip

Hello My Dear Friends! You can't pick up a paper or turn on a TV or radio without hearing about the critical upcoming Iowa caucus. Candidates camp out there, shaking babies and kissing hands. They eat in diners and bowling alleys, patting the backs of every Iowan they can find, in hopes of gaining their support. Could someone please tell me when and why we bestowed this almighty political power on a group of hayseeds sitting in a cornfield? It's mind boggling.
Remember all of those unaccompanied Central American youths that have been pouring over our southern border since 2011? Well, apparently the government doesn't. As it turns out, according to a recent Senate investigation, the Office of Refugee Resettlement (a branch of the department of Health and Human Services) failed to do proper background checks on the adults who claimed the children. They also failed to do any follow up investigation. The result? Thousands of these children were actually turned over to human traffickers and child abusers. Welcome to America! We know this now because several Guatemalan boys were found in a run down trailer park near Marion, Ohio, where they were being held captive and forced to work at a local egg farm. 120,000 of these youths have been placed, or misplaced, since 2011. Again, mind boggling.
As you know, I do like to learn something new every day. Today, I learned a doozy! Allow me to share. A group of students, aged 13-18, were given a paper and asked to select the "gender you self-identify with". Now, I'm all for being who you are and being true to yourself, but they were given 12 choices! 12 "gender" choices. What? Did I miss a memo? Among their choices were "tri-gender", "non-binary gender", "pangender" and "cisgender". I'm not going to lie to you. I had to look these up. The "tri" really threw me because, call me old fashioned, I was only aware of two genders. Turns out the third is really just a mix of the first two. Tri-gender people, according to the definition I found, is a person that moves between the two genders depending on their mood. So if you identify as a boy, a girl and a boygirl, you're tri-gender. Same deal for non-binary and pan gender. It seems to me that some one is really trying to confuse people. This brings me to my favorite, "Cisgender". This, according to definition, is a person who "experiences a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies and their personal identity". So, boy or girl, right? I'm a cisgender individual! What do you know. It does seem like an awfully convoluted query to pose to a 13 year old, doesn't it?
Oh well. Enjoy the weekend!
Po