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A gender symbol is a pictogram or glyph used to represent either biological sex or sociological gender (a terminological distinction originating in 1950s sociology) in either biology, medicine, genealogy or selective breeding, or in sociology, gender politics, LGBT subculture and identity politics.
Pictograms used to indicate male and female public toilets became widely used beginning in the 1960s.
Biology and medicine
The two standard sex symbols are the Mars symbol ♂ for male and Venus symbol ♀ for female, derived from astrological symbols, denoting the classical planets Mars and Venus, respectively. They were first used to denote the effective sex of plants (i.e. sex of individual in a given crossbreed, since most plants are hermaphroditic) by Carl Linnaeus in 1751.
They are still used in scientific publications to indicate the sex of an individual, for example of a patient. Pedigree charts published in scientific papers now more commonly use a square for male and a circle for female.
The shape of the Mars symbol has been likened to an iron-tipped spear (i.e. a weapon mainly used by men) and shape of the Venus symbol to a bronze mirror or a distaff (associated with women in the past).
Gender pictograms are frequently used to mark public toilets.
Since the 1970s, variations of gender symbols have also been used to express sexual orientation and political ideology. The first instance of this was the use of two interlocking male symbols to represent male homosexuality. Since the 2000s, numerous such variants have been introduced in the context of LGBT culture and politics. Some of these symbols have been adopted into Unicode (in the Miscellaneous Symbols block) beginning with version 4.1 (2005):