Just one example: the mindblowing volume that botanist Anne Wollstonecraft wrote in the 1820s in Cuba, only permissable because she did so under the guise of being an illustrator - beside making exquisite illustrations and detailed descriptions, she interviewed the indigenous people of Cuba and wrote about the ways in which they saw and used plants. Something a gentleman explorer would never ever do! The book was never published, only a single (!) hand-written (!!!) volume exists. It makes one weep at what could have been, had women been permitted to participate in this sexy, horny field of botany. How much richer we could all have been, how much more complete our understanding of the world. All because we had to frontload the whole thing with our own prejudices and sexist nonsense.

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Returning to my original point, which I lost sight of almost immediately: I wish we would stop referring to plants by the gendered terms we invented to refer to ourselves. Plants don't have genders, and thinking they do has caused a surprising amount of misery.

A happier postscript: to this day, there's a strong tradition of female botanical illustrators in Europe and the UK; I know plenty personally, all the masters are women. As has always been the case, people are resilient in the face of oppression, and so things improve and times change - though the past echoes on forever.

By the way, the mindblowing volume, "Specimens of the plants and fruits of the island of Cuba", which was discovered only a few years ago, can be viewed here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924100271489

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@cohanf I think pollen bearing and ovule bearing are good choices from the terminology that's available now - we'd have to expand our definition of pollen to include mosses and ferns and the like, so we can avoid 'microgametophyte' which I don't think would get much traction. Polliniferous and ovuliferous perhaps. The terms exist, and though it would certainly take getting used to, they're easy to explain and more informative than 'male' and 'female'.

It's interesting to think of the fact that the reproductive process is called 'pollination,' referring to the classically male side of the process only. And then there's dioecious and monoecious, referring to households, and hermaphroditic, referring to male and female gods. Even the words 'ovum' and 'seed' have their connotations to the human situation and the word 'gamete' is just the Greek for 'wife'. Some of it may be unavoidable, I'm not advocating we change the entire vocabulary though, just the worst offenders - for now.