Two of our favorite topics around here are waste or abuse in federal spending and the transgender madness currently gripping the nation. So what could be better than a story that combines both of them?

You can say goodbye to $130,000 out of the budget this year which went to the University of Washington to conduct an in-depth study for the National Science Foundation. They’re going to be interviewing hundreds of children between the ages of four and six, along with their parents, to find out about their “internal sense of gender identity.” The Free Beacon has the incredible details.

A grant for a two-year study was awarded to the University of Washington this summer. The project will interview 250 children aged four to six, and their parents, asking a series of questions about “gendered behavior.”

“Prominent theories of gender development have discussed the degree to which gender identity results from an internal sense of gender and socialization processes,” according to the grant. “However, tests of these theories have been limited because, for most children, internal gender identity and environmental socialization substantially overlap, rendering it impossible to distinguish the relative impact of each factor on gender development.”

The study will investigate whether gender theories, such as Gender Schema Theory that blames society on differences between genders, are sufficient for today’s “wider range of human gender experiences,” where there can be anywhere between 3, 37, and 58 genders.

Okay, so $130K out of the federal budget really isn’t all that much. After all, we spent nearly three times that much trying to figure out why insects are attracted to light bulbs. But far more important than the actual amount of money is the fact that somebody must have given a green light to this project. I thought we had some new people in charge in Washington these days? Who approved this?

And the study is focusing on preschool aged children. Are you kidding me? You’re going to start putting these questions to four year olds and expecting to get some sort of useful data out of it while filling their heads with even more dangerous nonsense. On that subject, perhaps you happened to catch the recent story of a 12 year old “transgender child” in Australia who is now a complete mess.

Patrick Mitchell was 12 when somebody managed to completely confuse him to the point where he “begged” his parents to allow him to “transition” to being a girl. They seemed thrilled at the prospect and began medical procedures almost immediately. He was given hormones foreign to his body to alter his development but, thankfully, no surgery. Two years later he woke up one morning and realized he was actually a boy. But now they have to back him off the hormones and schedule surgery to remove the breasts he began growing. God only knows what will happen to that child in the future.

And since I can’t stress this enough, Patrick Mitchell was twelve. This study is dealing with four and five year old toddlers. Not for nothing here, but while looking into a completely unrelated topic I recently read up on a story about a small group of children in that age group who were pitted against a parrot named Alex in some cognitive reasoning testing. No, I didn’t say “parent.” I said parrot. As in feathers. A beak. Polly want a cracker. And while it’s a major spoiler alert I’ll just go ahead and tell you… the parrot won.

These are children who were asked what they might like to be when they grew up and one of them said Spiderman while another one said “a pony.” And you want them to begin self-diagnosing a mental illness like gender dysphoria? Even worse, you’re going to alter the subjects of your study by getting them thinking about such things when they haven’t come close to dealing with anything regarding sexuality.

We’re really crashing and burning as a society here, folks. And if we can’t expect any help from Washington in 2017 in terms of nipping this in the bud we’re in for a long and calamitous race to the bottom.