Gender symbols
The male and female signs, once the planets Mars and Venus, and the newer symbols made from them, with where each came from.
Male and female
- Male symbol (♂)The sign for male: a circle with an arrow pointing up and to the right. It was the sign of the planet Mars, and of iron in alchemy, before the botanist Linnaeus used it for male plants in the 18th century.
- Female symbol (♀)The sign for female: a circle above a small cross. It was the sign of the planet Venus, and of copper in alchemy, before the botanist Linnaeus used it for female plants in the 18th century.
- Male and female symbol (⚥)A circle with the male arrow and the female cross both attached: Unicode’s male and female sign. Unicode lists it for intersex and androgynous, and as “hermaphroditic” in botany; Britannica calls it a bigender sign.
About gender symbols
♂ and ♀ were the signs of the planets Mars and Venus, and of iron and copper in alchemy, before they meant male and female. This collection follows them into biology and then to the newer gender symbols built from the same circle, arrow and cross. Each page says who gave a sign its meaning and when.
From planets to plants
Unicode still gives “Mars” and “alchemical symbol for iron” as other names for the male sign, and “Venus” and “alchemical symbol for copper” for the female sign. The neurologist G. D. Schott, writing in the BMJ in 2005, traces their path from astronomy and astrology through alchemy, chemistry and pharmacy to botany. The Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus used them in the 18th century for male and female plants, copying them, Schott says, from a 17th-century pharmacopoeia as a shorthand “in order to save space”. For hermaphrodite plants he used a third planet’s sign, Mercury’s ☿, Britannica notes.
On the family pedigree
Around 1900 British geneticists such as Galton and Pearson recommended the planetary signs for family pedigrees. American geneticists preferred the squares and circles Pliny Earle had drawn in 1845, which were easier to read and took up less space, and those are the shapes on pedigrees and genograms today.
Signs built from the circle
Unicode added a run of gender signs in version 4.1, published on 31 March 2005. Among them are the male and female sign ⚥, which Unicode lists for intersex and androgynous and Britannica calls a bigender designation, and the transgender symbol ⚧. The trans activist Holly Boswell is credited with designing ⚧ in 1993; PinkNews names Wendy Parker and Nancy R. Nangeroni as designers beside Boswell. Nangeroni has said the symbol “includes everyone, excluding none”.
Shield and mirror, or Greek letters?
Where the shapes of ♂ and ♀ came from is disputed. NASA reads them as pictures, the shield and spear of Mars and the hand mirror of Venus. Schott gives as “the most established view” that they began as contractions, in Greek script, of the planets’ Greek names, Thouros and Phosphoros.
Sources
- Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 2640 FEMALE SIGN; 2642 MALE SIGN; 26A5 MALE AND FEMALE SIGN
- Sex symbols ancient and modern: their origins and iconography on the pedigree, by G. D. Schott, BMJ 2005;331(7531):1509–1510, doi:10.1136/bmj.331.7531.1509, BMJ (PubMed Central full text), Classical origins; Squares and circles
- Gender symbol, by August Samie, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 21 November 2025 (Internet Archive copy, 13 December 2025), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction; history
- Solar System Symbols, NASA Science, NASA, The Symbols
- Unicode Character Database: DerivedAge.txt, the Unicode version in which each character was added, Unicode Consortium, 26A2..26B1
- Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard: publication dates, Unicode Consortium, Version 4.1.0
- Trans pioneer Holly Boswell dies, Dallas Voice, 22 August 2017, Dallas Voice, obituary
- The fascinating origin story of the famous transgender symbol, by Michele Theil, PinkNews, Trans Awareness Week, updated 13 November 2025, PinkNews, article
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research