Gender symbol

A gender symbol is a pictogram or glyph used to represent sex and gender, for example in biology and medicine, genealogy, LGBTQ subculture, or gender politics. In his books Mantissa Plantarum (1767) and Mantissa Plantarum Altera (1771), Carl Linnaeus regularly used the planetary symbols of Mars, Venus and Mercury (♂, ♀ and ☿) for male, female and hermaphroditic (perfect) flowers, respectively. Botanists now use ⚥ for the last. In genealogy, including kinship in anthropology and pedigrees in animal husbandry, the geometric shapes △ or □ are used for male and ○ for female. These symbols 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.