somebody told me that you've got a girlfriend who looks like a boyfriend that i had in february of last year

In my hateful job, working for the man, we collect demographic information about patients, which is entered into an electronic disease database.  The program identifies some common logic errors during the data entry process, to cut down on the amount of quality control procedures that have to be done later.  In addition, some of the data on the form is drawn from the client's record in the database system.  The database system collects the patient's gender, and the form uses that response to autopopulate the patient's sex at birth.

In case you haven't heard, it's the fucking millennium, and gender and sex are not the same thing. (In case the gentle reader needs clarification, sex is a biological characteristic, whereas gender is a social identification, and doesn't necessarily align with the biological sex.)  And a public agency should know that, even if the general populace is unaware.  I went on a mission when the autopopulation was introduced to try to correct the mistake, but everyone agreed that it was an unimportant distinction.

So fast-forward to now, and it's my job to make sure data are entered completely and accurately into the system.  Some of them I enter myself, and those are no problem: I enter "unknown" for the gender and fill out the biological sex at birth according to the form.  I've been doing it for months now.  It's also part of my job to assist others entering data, and they seem to be treating gender as sex, appreciating the auto-population feature.  This makes me GRRRRR, but no one listens to me so who cares?  And then my boss asks me how I've been dealing with this issue, and I told her, and added "that's what I'd tell anybody who asked me about it, too.  Because I'm not permitted to make any assumptions about patient data, and gender is not included on the form."  I'm expecting to be read the riot act, because she likes to do that to me.  But sometimes she surprises me, as when she responded, "Good answer."  Hmm.

I'm completely ashamed of the inner workings of this office and its cost to the taxpayers.  It's perfectly obvious to me why the government is out of money...and it's only tangentially related to gender vs. sex, but sometimes one small example of idiocy opens a window to view the rest of the problem.