Different item. While Gender benders could optionally be built with a null modem inside, as a single item their purpose was to link incompatible male and female ports.

Having both a null modem and a gender bender end-to-end was common.

Still is! I carry around gender-benders, null modem adapters and 120ohm CAN db9 resistors every day, along with usb-to-serial, peak can to usb, kvaser to usb, and ixxat to usb.

These aren’t dead technologies by any stretch, not that you were implying that.

So how did you reference master/slave? That term is already in use in the real world of human ideology.

I’ll bet you’re not a native English speaker. Nothing wrong with that, btw.

"Gender bender" does not accurately describe what gender changers actually did, so whatever.

A gender bender changes the perceived gender of something so that other things that are going to interact with it interact with it appropriately.

Seems pretty spot-on to me.

Yes, it "changes" the gender - so that's why we call them "gender changers"

Sorry if you don't see the pejorative connotations in the other term. We avoided it because we didn't wish to offend people.

> Sorry if you don't see the pejorative connotations in the other term. We avoided it because we didn't wish to offend people.

You remind me of one of the tech leads I have the occasional displeasure of interacting with. He'll blow in with some new work for us to do, and a stack of reasons to do it. The topmost in the stack he'll provide, and the rest of the stack he keeps hidden. The problem with his stack of reasons are twofold:

1) It takes no less than five and -typically- fifteen minutes to get through the stack.

2) Only the reason at the base of the stack is non-bogus. All of the others are calibrated to sound _great_ to folks who don't work on the thing (and talk to customers who use the thing) day in and day out.

Next time, start with the reason at the bottom of your stack when you're talking to technical folks like us. ;)