Transgender symbol (⚧)
The symbol of the transgender community: a circle with the male arrow, the female cross and a third arm, an arrow crossed by a stroke. The trans activist Holly Boswell is credited with designing it in 1993.
Meaning
Unicode encodes it as U+26A7 MALE WITH STROKE AND MALE AND FEMALE SIGN, and gives “transgender” as its other name. PinkNews describes it as a circle with two arrows coming out of its top left and right, one of them crossed by a line, and a cross coming out of the bottom: the signs for men and for women, with one for androgyny. Britannica reads the third arm, an arrow and a cross combined, as the blending or transcendence of conventional gender categories. It is the transgender community’s own symbol, and is often set on the transgender flag.
Origin and history
Holly Boswell, a trans activist who co-founded Asheville’s Phoenix Transgender Support Group, is credited with designing the symbol in 1993, Dallas Voice reported when Boswell died in 2017, aged 66. Boswell had been one of the first to use the word transgender, in an article of 1991, and founded the Kindred Spirits trans-spiritual network in 1993, according to the LGBTQ+ Religious Archives Network.
Unicode encoded the symbol in version 4.1, published on 31 March 2005, as U+26A7, in the same run of gender signs as the male and female sign ⚥. It became an emoji, ⚧️, in Emoji 13.0, alongside the transgender flag emoji, 🏳️⚧️.
Who designed it
Accounts differ on the credit. Dallas Voice called Boswell “the creator of the first transgender symbol” and dated the design to 1993. PinkNews names three designers, in the 1990s: in its account Boswell drew the symbol for Wendy Parker, a national transgender organiser, who persuaded Nancy R. Nangeroni, a diversity educator and the founder of GenderTalk Radio, to make a digital version, and Nangeroni later made a pin with the design.
In the words of its makers
Nangeroni has said the symbol “includes everyone, excluding none” and “represents the wholeness of a society, which includes the transgender”, PinkNews reports. Wearing it, Nangeroni said, may say that someone is transgender and proud enough to let people know, or “I am a friend of (a) transgender (person), and I want you to know it”, and added: “I would ask that we make it stand for honour and integrity, compassion for all and good humour.”
On the transgender flag
Many people set the symbol on the transgender flag, which Monica Helms designed in 1999, PinkNews notes.
Often confused with
The male and female symbol ⚥ has only the arrow and the cross. The transgender symbol’s third arm, up and to the left with a short stroke across it, is on its own Unicode’s male with stroke sign, ⚦, which Unicode also lists as transgender and as an old alchemical symbol for iron.
Read next
- Next in Gender symbolsMale 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.
- The same shape in Occult and alchemical symbolsPlanetary metals (☉ ☽ ☿ ♀ ♂ ♃ ♄)The seven signs alchemists wrote for the seven metals known in antiquity, each borrowed from the heavenly body it was paired with: the sun ☉ for gold, the moon ☽ for silver, Mercury ☿ for quicksilver, Venus ♀ for copper, Mars ♂ for iron, Jupiter ♃ for tin and Saturn ♄ for lead.
See also
Male and female symbol (⚥), Female symbol (♀).
Sources
- Unicode Character Database: NamesList.txt, Unicode Consortium, 26A6–26A7
- 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, Versions 4.1.0 and 13.0.0
- emoji-test.txt, Emoji Keyboard/Display Test Data for UTS #51, version 18.0, 30 April 2026, Unicode Consortium, gender; flag
- Gender symbol, by August Samie, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 21 November 2025 (Internet Archive copy, 13 December 2025), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Introduction
- 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
- Holly Boswell, profile, LGBTQ+ Religious Archives Network, LGBTQ+ Religious Archives Network, Biography
The same shape elsewhere
Browse symbols formed from arrows, circles or crosses.
Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 9, 2026. How we research
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