Gabu!! ☁️ ΘΔ

The only thing that'd be lost with changing the "gendered" terms of plugs is that gender changers would lose their incredible name

I always remember the time when I was in college that a friend of mine working in the something-computing-something-center (whatever it was called) had to explain it to someone who didn't know and yeah...

Let's change them to top and bottom ayoooooo

i think 'innie' and 'outtie' are really funny so my vote is for that one

"plug" "socket" "inverse plug" "inverse socket"

I've actually had this thought rattle about in my head several times over the years. To me, in the simplest case, plug is associated with the pin, and socket with the hole, with the example springing to mind being the classic TRS style connector. This contrasts with connectors that have a recessed pin and extruded hole, like the coaxial F connector. For that case, one way would be to consider the plug to be the part that enters a void in the socket, but to my mind, it makes more sense that the pin is always the plug and the hole is always the socket. So to specify something like the F connector, you might say "inverted plug" and "inverted socket". For the category, something as simple as "connector" might be ok, and a device for connecting two similar ends might be a "(plug/socket) cross connector", or a "dual (plug/socket) (connector/adapter)". People tend to come up with their own names for such devices anyway.

Let's just call the pin part "1" (because it's a thing) and the socket part "0" (because it's a hole, or absence of a thing)

The digit 1 even resembles a pin and 0 resembles a hole

Master/slave never made much sense to begin with, and even less so with modern complex devices that send commands back and forth. Host/peripheral probably works better here, or primary/secondary, controller/target etc, depending on the actual devices.

what about "pinnage" instead of "gender?" no reason you can't just have a new word. there are new words all the time. "a plug's pinnage can be pinned or holed" for instance. use a pinnage changer to convert a pinned plug to holed or vice versa

When I used to teach computer science classes, I'd occasionally need to stop the class an apologize for the decades of ha-ha-it-sounds-like-saying-an-inappropriate-thing terminology and to hope that nobody was listening in to the lectures. So many racist stereotypes, so much terminology clearly kept because it sounds like heterosexual sex, and probably more.

obviously we need to call it "holiness".

incorporating this into my idiolect immediately

she gudgeon on my pintle till i piston

unfortunately,

tbh even as much as i hate male and female as terms for plug gender, (and i personally use "innie" and "outie" as replacements) i don't really mind "gender" being used to describe the nature of whether a plug is innie or outie, in large part because the word "gender" is already used to describe something that has very little to do with Gender (Social Construct): linguistic gender (a lot of monolingual english speakers think linguistic gender is the same as social gender but it's really not).

gender is also cognate with genre, and in french those are the same words. i think gender in english use to refer to "kinds", similar to genre ,until fairly recently actually. but citation needed. so to me it feels fairly reasonable to call it gender still but in a broad sense of the word as just "of or pertaining to several kinds" and then people will be less confused by a neologism of unclear meaning

i guess if you wanted to be funny you could call it "genre" though.

i guess writing this out i realize that "kind" could also work okay