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Gender symbol
Symbols of gender, sex, or sexuality / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A gender symbol is a pictogram or glyph used to represent sex and gender, for example in biology and medicine, in genealogy, or in the sociological fields of gender politics, LGBT subculture and identity politics.
![Image shows male and female symbols incised deeply](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/aa/SBB_Giruno_by_Stadler_%2846959878215%29.jpg/640px-SBB_Giruno_by_Stadler_%2846959878215%29.jpg)
In his books Mantissa Plantarum (1767) and Mantissa Plantarum Altera (1771), Carl Linnaeus regularly used the planetary symbols of Mars, Venus and Mercury – ♂, ♀, ☿ – for male, female and hermaphroditic (perfect) flowers, respectively.[1] Botanists now use ⚥ for the last.[2]
In genealogy, including kinship in anthropology and pedigrees in animal husbandry, the geometric shapes △ or □ are used for male and ○ for female. These are also used on public toilets in some countries.
The modern international pictograms used to indicate male and female public toilets, 🚹︎ and 🚺︎, became widely used in the 1960s and 1970s. They are sometimes abstracted to ▽ for male and △ for female.[3]