ArcaMax

Eternal vigilance is the price of paranoia, and that's why I check my garage carefully every day.

I check the garage because I figure if we get mice, that's where they're gonna get in first.

We had mice in our last house. We had them for about two weeks, and then the exterminator we hired killed them all, and we had a couple of small cracks in our foundation patched.

But at least the mice we had were, well, normal. You know, they weren't, well ...

Transgender.

I didn't want to say "transgender" right out because one of your kids might read this, and then he/she might become a she/he because if a kid is exposed to any kind of gayness for even a second, the kid goes gay goofy and stays that way for the rest of their lives. You can't make the little maniacs learn algebra, but they'll turn gay if a drag queen reads 'em a book called "Danny the Duck is Debbie Now."

President Donald Trump, babbling his way through his Rape of the Union Address, took time out from peeing on the memory of the Founding Fathers to note that his administration had uncovered a government program that Trump said was wasting millions of dollars making mice transgender.

Turns out that's not what government was doing. What they were doing was screwing around with the genetic structure of mice because they wanted to help people with cancer.

Yeah, well, I say the hell with that stuff. All right-thinking Americans would rather see a million women die of breast cancer than see even one mouse put down his pistol and pick up a purse. Cancer is natural. Transgender mice are not natural, and Trump, despite his dye job, is a fan of natural masculinity.

I don't know how the scientists are crossing the mouse wires, but it seems expensive. Mice are small. I could probably do gender reassignment surgery on a mouse with an X-Acto knife and a really tiny pair of scissors.

"It's creepy," I told my wife. "Now, not only do I gotta worry about mice getting into my house, but I gotta worry about the mice being transgender."

"How could you tell if they were?" she said. "They don't wear clothes."

"Easy," I said. "You catch the mouse. Then, you hold the mouse in your left hand on its furry little back. Then, using the index finger of your right hand, you ... "

"Shut up," my wife explained.

There's a certain kind of guy who's only got one thing he can really hold on to, and it's not his Harvard class ring.

He needs his gender. He doesn't want to lose his gender, and he doesn't want anyone giving up their gender because that would mean that what he's holding on to isn't as valuable as he thinks. If you can change gender, then what he's holding on to is about as valuable as stock in a Donald Trump casino.

If they do stop doing those mousey transgender experiments, I hope they have the good sense to gas all the mice who got their sex changed.

I hope they don't just turn those mice loose. If they do, I'm gonna go out in my garage to stand night guard, and there's gonna be a gay pride parade going on between the snow shovels and the lawn mower.

I haven't been feeling so good since they took Aunt Jemima off the syrup bottle, and I'm not sure I can take any more loss.

To find out more about Marc Dion, and read words by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle and iBooks.