The Gender Table

In my current job, I write hot fixes for a buggy 3-tier VB6 app. The app connects to a SQL Server database and has a Person table. This table has the typical demographic fields like first, last, middle name and birth date. There is also a ‘Gender_ID’ field.

The Gender_ID field is a numeric field that can hold 100000 numbers. That means we can have 100000 different genders. Last I heard, there were only 2.

Technically, we could use a bit field. But sometimes you just don’t know the gender. So that means you need a 3^rd choice: ’Unknown’. This is the thing about real life. There are no black and white answers.

A common practice of old (before Y2K) was to use a single character (byte) field. The storage space allowed for 256 choices, but we could use a letter that was easily understood in reports. The choices were typically M, F, or U.

Apparently, the designers of our software were very forward thinking. They must have realized that there are people out there that have undergone sex changes and, since the software is used in a clinical setting, that fact may be pertinent to certain diagnoses. The Gender_ID field therefore links to a Gender table. The Gender table includes a 255-character description field. This design allows us to create a gender like ‘Was born a man, became a woman at age 23 and then switched back after finding God at age 42.’

This design also allows us to prepare for the inevitable clash with alien species that may have more than 2 genders. Can you imagine a species that requires 3 or 4 individuals to reproduce? Many plants and simple organisms reproduce asexually. It’s not a stretch to reason that since there are examples of single and double gender species, there may be triple or quadruple gender species as well.

What is the advantage of having two genders? Since a single sex species reproduces exact replicas (clones, if you will), diversity within such a species is limited and mutations are rare. Adding a second set of chromosomes mixes up the pot a bit. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that adding a third set would create even more diversity – as well as more chances of mutations?

If you increase the chances of mutation, you increase the speed a species can adapt to a changing environment. That may be desirable in the current administration.

So if you take this argument sideways and wrap it around man’s baser instincts to have sex with everything that moves, you come to the conclusion that those that society considers sexually abnormal (i.e. gays and Mormons) are taking point in the evolution of the species.