The Gender Field Must Be Fixed ASAP!
The door clattered like a dispirited gong as Blake, the county government’s new patriotization officer and unwokeification expert, stormed into the little conference room in a huff.
The development team’s prioritization meeting was in progress, and their manager, Suresh, greeted the intrusion with a half-hearted acknowledgement, adding, “Since you are here, we are reviewing the HR app changes and have questions on how the Patriot Ethics Committee will review pregnancy leave requests—”
Blake slammed his laptop onto the table’s scuffed surface. Concerns more pressing than the HR app burned at the center of his focus. “I was just in the middle of reviewing the IT department’s assets,” he declared, “when I discovered a serious problem.”
His laptop seized virtual control of the room’s projector. On the wall, the torn screen’s image switched to a conceptual data model, the kind used by technologists to convey the logical structure of a database without the distraction of cryptic details. After panning and zooming, a rectangular box came into view, representing a database table with the name Personnel.Employee—a master list of all workers on the county’s payroll.
Blake spoke nothing, presuming the display illustrated his point, but Suresh and his four programmers around the table gaped at it obtusely. “The Gender field…?” snapped Blake but the others still stared. Patience abating, he pointed out, “It says ternary. That means it supports three choices, right?”
“Um, yes,” Suresh replied. “Ternary means three.”
“Well, that doesn’t make sense! Also, it’s like a major offense to our county’s new core values!”
“Um, I do not understand.”
“It should be binary, Suresh. Forget the HR app. The gender field must be fixed A-S-A-P!”
Suresh considered the matter. Fortunately for him, decisions regarding the database design fell not within the domain of the development team but rather the database administration team and its sole employee, Kenneth.
Dismissing the meeting prematurely, Suresh escorted Blake down the beige carpeted hall adorned with faded motivational posters, around the bend and to the last door, unmarked and slightly ajar. Blake knocked, and they entered a pigsty of a windowless office. Shelves upon shelves lined each wall, overflowing with bundles of cables and gutted rack servers and square monitors and yellowed tower computers and other yesteryear’s hardware. Unmarked boxes of even more scrap crowded the room—stacks of them everywhere—arranged alongside a narrow path that led to the far wall and a desk smothered in papers. At the desk sat Kenneth, his back to his guests, all six foot four and two hundred sixty pounds of him, engrossed in a complex SQL procedure on twin computer screens, stroking his shaggy beard in thought.
“So, Kenneth…” Blake addressed him, but the big man’s concentration declined to waver. Then, with the authority conferred upon Blake by his title and by the county executive who hired him and who also happened to be his brother-in-law, he raised his voice. “So, Kenneth. Are you familiar with the Employee table?”
The twenty-year veteran of the county’s IT department pulled off his glasses and rubbed his baggy eyes. He swiveled the chair to face Blake. “The one in the Personnel schema,” he responded dryly. “Of course.”
“Well, then, are you aware that its gender field is ternary? Gender fields are supposed to be binary.”
Kenneth slid his glasses back on. “That would be a mistake.” His attention returned to the code on his monitors.
The room hummed lightly with the whir of servers powered on in some hidden nook. In the near silence, Blake grew incredulous. “What?! What do you… Listen. This is a serious problem, and it needs to be fixed on priority! And if the database is this messed up, then so is the personnel app, right?”
Suresh wasn’t familiar but Kenneth, who shepherded the transitions of a dozen employee management systems during his tenure, turned back around to confirm. “The gender field in the app is indeed in sync with the database column in its support for three choices.” Again, he removed his frames. “This design is admittedly not ideal and certainly not how I would have built it had it not preceded my own employment here. It would make more sense for the Gender column to be a foreign key relationship to a lookup table having unbounded choices. However, such a change would be too disruptive for a team of, uh, this size to handle, which is why adding the PreferredPronouns column had been such a good workaround.” That last part he laced thinly with bitterness.
“Wait a second,” Blake snickered. “Are you suggesting the database should support even more than three genders? Are you crazy?!”
“Hmm. Are you thinking of sex? As in biological sex? That is typically a binary choice although the reality, as always, leaves room for exceptions. Anyway, the database does not support a field for sex since that kind of personal characteristic has never been relevant to our employment records.”
The laptop held at Blake’s side began to quiver. His other hand pointed a righteous finger at the seated man. “What you are saying is exactly the kind of woke nonsense I was hired to rid our great county of! But anyway, it doesn’t matter what you think. That field needs to be made binary right now!”
The exchange garnered no participation from Suresh who gazed at the timeworn floor and shifted his feet. Lights on the tiled ceiling flickered and buzzed. Sighing in his chair, Kenneth looked into Blake’s eyes. “So, my mother’s side of our family is from Mexico. I have a cousin there, in Oaxaca, who is a muxe. Are you familiar with that term? Well, a muxe may appear to us like a transgender woman, but in their culture, they are considered a third gender that is distinct from male and female. In both Tahiti and Hawaii, there are people of a separate gender—māhūs—who have served important functions within their societies for generations. Many Native American cultures have what are called ‘two-spirit’ genders. Ancient Jewish texts identify up to six distinct genders to classify people who display atypical gender characteristics or are intersex. And in South Asian countries like India, their people have recognized a third gender, hijras, for thousands of years.”
“That is correct,” Suresh concurred.
Kenneth continued, “Many cultures around the world and throughout history have learned that some individuals do not fit into a gender classification that is tightly bound to sex and have devised numerous genders to varying degrees of suitability, not to mention the growing acceptance of non-binary individuals in our own nation.
“My job is to ensure that our database maintains the highest order of integrity. That starts with its design which must meticulously mirror the world around us as it is. The less our database conforms to the truth, the more untrustworthy and useless it becomes. With that aside, a binary gender column would not even make sense within the bastardization of gender that the new county government has mandated because there are still exceptions that require a ternary choice at least. Even if our department’s manpower was not attenuated by budget cuts and my very employment was put on the line, I still could not make such a change until the completion of the other projects your office has demanded of mine such as removing all traces of the PreferredPronouns column, plus adding trigger rules to the Gender column so that changes cannot be made without approval by the Patriot Ethics Committee and whose annual schedule of reviews seems purposely inconvenient.”
Discomfort grew in the stillness of the office’s white noise. Behind Blake’s eyes smoldered anger at the affront to his nepotistic authority and his four-week unwokeness certification. His mouth, when it finally opened, spoke in a low, measured tone. “I can’t believe I have to say this, but…there is no such thing as other genders. They don’t exist. Pick up a science book.” Kenneth began to retort but Blake shouted over him. “It shouldn’t be hard to select your gender from two choices! Anyone who can’t fill out a simple form isn’t intelligent enough to work for this county! Understand?!” The others remained silent. “Now finish your current projects and then make fixing the gender field your next priority!” He looked directly at Kenneth. “And right now I want you to give me the names and details of any employees in the database table who aren’t marked male or female. If there are any left, then they’re in violation of the county’s code of decency for being woke in public. You can query or whatever for that, right?”
Without a word, the bulky civil servant returned to the monitors and, again donning glasses, typed into a new query window, his mechanical keyboard crunching and gnashing beneath beefy fingertips. The arcane commands perplexed Blake as he gazed over the database admin’s shoulder with a lapsed attention. Once complete, the query was executed and the results were dumped to a spreadsheet, blank except for a single row. Kenneth expanded the columns to read their full texts.
“Wait… Why is that my name?” Blake stared at the screen. “Is this some kind of joke?”
Kenneth gestured. “Look at the gender column.”
Blake peered closer. “My gender is ‘NULL’? What does that mean?! Is it from the database? This isn’t funny, smart guy!”
Leaning back in his chair, Kenneth rubbed his nose and sighed. “Null means nothing. You see, a long time ago someone designed the Gender column to support three values: 0 for male, 1 for female and null for when the gender is not recorded because something went wrong. These days, null values typically mean that the form wasn’t scanned properly into the personnel onboarding system. The Gender column has historically been insignificant to one’s employment here which is why holes in the data have been tolerated…until now. Perhaps you filled out your employment form with a pen instead of a number two pencil?”
“No, I didn’t!” snapped Blake. “I know how to follow instructions!”
“Then I will venture a guess that you defaced the biographical section of our old employment form with protests against the Preferred Pronouns question.” Blake’s eyes widened but he said nothing. “This has happened before to new hires who, uh, exude a certain temperament. Instead of leaving it blank, they answer the question with a long screed of grievances exceeding the form’s margin. This, obviously, short-circuits the scan. The receptionist will try to correct the missing fields but, in your case, it seems they avoided making an assumption, probably due to your gender-neutral name.”
The patriotization officer fumed. “So, the gender field is already binary but mine is set to blank? Ok, then change it! You have access, right?”
“Even if I were inclined to skirt protocol,” replied Kenneth, “the new triggers prevent me from altering gender data without Patriot Ethics Committee approval. I believe you are familiar with our new, lengthy gender update process which also requires a, uh, certified medical exam.”
Blake threw up his hands. His laptop waved in the air like a feeble shield. “But that’s only for woke gender changes! Fix it now!!”
“Sorry, but that is the process we were ordered to implement, to spec. It’s unfortunate that the rule is too overly broad to have anticipated this sort of scenario. Then again, such rules are seldom crafted with care or consideration.”
An indignant resignation crossed Blake’s pursed face. He let forth a heavy breath. “Fine! I’ll just submit a request and get this taken care of and, uh, it’ll be a good test of the system!”
“But…,” Suresh cautioned, “the committee does not meet again until next year, right?”
Blake glared at him. Then, nose held high, he stomped through the tunnel of boxes and out of the room with no further word.
“He was right about one thing,” remarked Kenneth, returning to his code. “Anyone unable to fill out their employment form isn’t intelligent enough to work here.”
~