Several engineering leaders forced the Networks team to create an internal RFC on proposed naming convention changes for this, which was then circulated to a wider set of reviewers.

Once it reached the reviewers, someone with common sense stepped in and asked how many actual women engineers or gender non-binary engineers reviewed it, and did they actually think it represented some type of progress on problematic language.

So they formed a committee of female and gender non-binary coworkers to review it, and their conclusion was that this was harmless language clearly and obviously rooted in decades old technical standards that did not invite or inflame any type of comparison with genitalia or gender choices among people, and that instead of worrying about this kind of exceedingly trivial issue, attention would be better paid to more overt and damaging language problems, like harassment or microbehaviors that disadvantage women in group leadership situations.

On one hand I was very proud of the conclusion they reached, but on the other hand very terrified at the whole process, ranging from extreme reactionary forced changes with no basis in reality all the way to giving a committee of women and gender non-binary coworkers carte blanche to rule on whether or not the language had to be changed (as if the rest of us don’t have brains and can’t voice opinions that ought to carry equal weight about that).

All told it was a colossal waste of time and money that deeply compromised employee trust in company leadership.