That big DNC shindig in Chicago turns out to be the gift that keeps on giving, particularly in terms of what went on in the rules committee. As we previously discussed, they took the bold (and risky) move of cutting their superdelegates out of the first ballot at their next convention unless a consensus candidate has already emerged. (Though they failed to impose a ban on dirty fossil fuel money in their campaign contributions.) But that wasn’t the end of the fireworks. The transgender (or “gender spectrum”) contingent of the base had other demands and because it’s 2018 they couldn’t be ignored.

As Jack Crowe at National Review pointed out, the rules change to handle this prickly question produced some seriously humorous results. The Democrats had previously enforced a rule mandating that the number of men and women on each committee had to be either perfectly equal or with an imbalance of no more than one if the committee has an odd number of members. But now “gender” doesn’t mean anything among Democrats since your gender is whatever you happen to feel like when you wake up in the morning. Never fear, progressive socialists! They’ve got it covered. (Emphasis added)

Members of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) voted on Saturday to modify its charter to define gender as being determined by self-identification and to include a classification for gender non-binary members.

The previous charter required that all committees be divided evenly between men and women but, under the newly adopted system, committees “shall be as equally divided as practicable between men and women (determined by gender self-identification) meaning that the variance between men and women in the group cannot exceed one (1).”

Additionally, gender non-binary members will count as neither male nor female, while the remaining, gendered members will be divided evenly between male and female.

These guys haven’t nearly covered all their bases on this subject. What about members who were born male, later decided they were female, but switched back to male while reserving the right to switch again before the end of the meeting? Also, the entire privacy issue is being ignored here. I’ve run across enough “gender spectrum” people on social media now to know that some of them insist on absolutely gender neutral pronouns because they do have a “preferred gender” but don’t want to tell you which one it is. What about them? If you guess wrong you’ll be in violation of your own rules.

The real problem here is the issue of the “gender non-binary” members. If a significant number of them are men (no matter what they call themselves) and those slots don’t count toward the total membership numbers, then women will only be allocated half of the remaining seats, putting them well below fifty percent. Or vice versa if most of the non-binary crowd are women. To paraphrase the senior waitress in the movie Leap of Faith, “I can smell trouble coming like crap on a griddle.”

One way to have avoided all of these issues in the first place could have been to establish a truly gender-blind, colorblind and every other demographic-blind system where you simply put the best candidates with the most applicable qualifications, experience and willingness to serve on each committee. If it turns out that there are more men than women, so be it. If they’re all women that’s fine too. If not enough minorities, Muslims or cisgender people qualify and are interested, you go with what you have. We’re not a strictly homogeneous population in those terms. But if you have the best people for the job you’re probably going to produce the best work.

Wait… are we still allowed to say “people” in 2018 or is that offensive to somebody because it’s cishomeosapic? Should it just be the most qualified lifeforms? Oh, wait. Now I’m leaving out the dead, so everyone suffering from Cotard’s syndrome will be offended. Perhaps DNC committee assignments should just be limited to the total number of things on each panel. Unless one of them turns out to be imaginary, of course. We can’t leave the imaginary people out.

(NOTE: The author hereby claims original ownership of the term “cishomeosapic” in case any of you progressives are thinking of stealing it. And you’re going to have to pay me.)