This question brings up an important question:

Do we want to allow or avoid the use of non-standard English such as the words zie and zir as non gender specific pronouns on this site?


Question: CASTING attributes for Ordering on a Doctrine2 DQL Query
Answer: Try this one by with out changing the data type

  select (entity1 * 1) as display_value, entity1 as return_value 
      from Table_Name
     order by 1 asc;