Gender symbol

}} The three standard sex symbols in biology are male , female and hermaphroditic ; originally the symbol for Mercury, , was used for the last. These symbols were first used by Carl Linnaeus in 1751 to denote whether flowers were male (stamens only), female (pistil only) or perfect flowers with both pistils and stamens. ==Genealogy==

Kinship charts use a triangle for male and circle for female. Pedigree charts published in scientific papers use an earlier anthropological convention of a square for male and a circle for female. Before a shape distinction was adopted, all individuals had been represented by a circle in Morgan's 1871 System of Consanguinity and Affinity of Human Family, where gender is encoded in the abbreviations for the kin relation (e.g. M for 'mother' and F for 'father'). W. H. R. Rivers distinguished gender in the words of the language being recorded by writing male kinship terms in all capitals and female kinship terms with normal capitalization. That convention was quite influential for a time, and his convention of prioritizing male kin by placing them to the left and females to the right continues to this day though there have been exceptions, such as Margaret Mead, who placed females to the left. ==Public toilets==

The modern gender symbols used for public toilets, for male and for female, are pictograms created for the British Rail system in the mid-1960s. Before that, local usage had been more variable. For example, schoolhouse outhouses in the 19th-century United States had ventilation holes in their doors that were shaped like a starburst Sun or like a crescent Moon , respectively, to indicate whether the toilet was for use by boys or girls. The British Rail pictogramsoften color-coded blue and redare now the norm for marking public toilets in much of the world, with the female symbol distinguished by a triangular skirt or dress, and in early years (and sometimes still) the male symbol stylized like a tuxedo. In mainland China, silhouettes of heads in profile may be used as gender pictograms, generally alongside the Chinese characters for male (男) and female (女). Some contemporary designs for restroom signage in public spaces are shifting away from symbols that demonstrate gender as binary as a way to be more inclusive. File:Toilets unisex.svg|Standard American Institute of Graphic Arts(AIGA) symbols File:Female symbol on public restroom.JPG|Non-AIGA women's symbol on a legally mandated circular background in US File:Male symbol on public restroom.JPG|Non-AIGA men's symbol on a legally mandated triangular background in US File:Gender Neutral Bathroom.jpg|Gender-neutral sign in US, composed of legally mandated circle and triangle File:Toilet for everyone.jpg|Accessible gender-neutral sign icon File:All gender restroom sign.jpg|Idiosyncratic unisex restroom in US (see LGBT symbols) File:5754-Linxia-City-Xiguan-Lu-public-toilet.jpg|Public toilet in China, with female silhouette to the left and male to the right File:Restroom (4652458500).jpg|Idiosyncratic symbols in Japan File:CAM00224 Washroom (11211245793).jpg|Humorous symbols in Austria File:Toalett (Budapest) 1.svg|Semi-triangular tuxedo and dress shapes in Hungary File:Toilet Promenadengalerien Linz - sign.jpg|Triangle-plus-circle symbols in Austria File:Wojska Polskiego WC Jurata (cropped).jpg|Circle (female) and inverted triangle (male) in Poland File:Sigiŝoaro, duseksa necesejo, 1.jpeg|Sign in Romania, with men's and women's shoes representing gender File:Separate toilets for three genders.jpg|Male, female and hijra (trans) public toilets in India File:Toilet signs in Madrid horticulture garden.jpg|Signs in the Real Jardín Botánico de Madrid; the male is depicted with a large upper body and the female with wide hips File:Placa multigêner kúyr acessível.jpg|Rainbow accessible multigender icon with gender-neutral word File:Transgender woman's bathroom symbol.jpg|A bathroom sign in the US showing a transgender flag across a woman's bathroom symbol ==Sexual orientation and gender politics==

Since the 1970s, variations of gender symbols have been used to express sexual orientation and gender politics. Two interlocking male symbols are used to represent gay men while two interlocking female symbols are often used to represent lesbians. Two female and two male symbols interlocked represent bisexuality, while an interlocked female and male symbol represents heterosexuality. Some of these symbols have been adopted into Unicode (in the Miscellaneous Symbols block) beginning with version 4.1 in 2005. ==Encoding==