DBAs take on Marriage Equality, or The Y2Gay Problem
A geekily-hilarious but also serious treatment of one of the least bigoted objections to the Marriage Equality decision of last Friday: the database administrators of the world now have hell to pay.
Excerpt:
Of course, we live in the twenty-first century, and in the words of Eddie Izzard, "there's gonna be a lot more guys with makeup during this millennium". Basically what I'm talking about is your non-conventional people, your non-male-non-female folks. Just having sex as a "male or female" choice is as short-sighted as having "marriage" as a "husband or wife" choice. You may need something like:
humans- id - forename - surname - birthdate - sex_id (foreign key references column sexes) marriages - id - partner_1_id (foreign key references column humans.id) - partner_2_id (foreign key references column humans.id) - marriage_date - divorce_date (NULL if marriage not ended) sexes - id - string
...where the latter table would contain such well-known sexes as "female", "male", "intersexed", "not stated" and leave room for juggling later, since gender roles will doubtless become more non-trivial as time passes.
In fact, the whole "gender"/"sex" thing is more complicated than this. As we all (should) know, "sex" is a strictly biological term referring primarily to the shape of the organs between your legs while "gender" is more of a mental identity or social role term, so let's include that too:
Yeah - go read the whole thing. It's actually all quite funny.