Talk:Gender symbol

Child Symbol

I seek a child symbol to go along with the female symbol and the male symbol. If such a symbol exists, this article may document it. --Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.28.185.40 (talk) 20:12, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Don't think there's one which is a variation of the gender symbols, but child variants of the "toilet" symbols are sometimes seen; see File:Forest day 1 logo.jpg, File:Yellow school sign.JPG, File:Italian traffic signs - old - transito vietato ai pedoni.svg etc. AnonMoos (talk) 21:25, 20 March 2011 (UTC)

Koch

P.S. See also the Rudolf Koch gender and family symbols... AnonMoos (talk) 18:09, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

History of toilet symbols

Supposedly in pre-1850 rural schools in the United States, a sun symbol meant a boys' outhouse, while a crescent symbol meant a girls' outhouse. -- AnonMoos (talk) 08:35, 1 December 2016 (UTC)

The source seems reasonable. The illustrations are by the modern author, though, so we can't use them directly, but it's still a good find. — kwami (talk) 04:15, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I only see one "illustration", a semi-nonsensical cartoon without the slightest aspirations to historicity. In European symbolic art, if male and female were contrasted as sun and moon, the sun usually had alternating wavy and straight rays, but I have no idea how that would have translated to early 19th-century rural American outhouse-door carvers... AnonMoos (talk) 20:29, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I'll see what I can find. Very common to have no hole at all (ventilation being elsewhere), even in duplex outhouses, or to have a heart in the door. A few crescent and star (on a single door). — kwami (talk) 22:25, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Aha! The Outhouse Museum in Colome, SD has a duplex outhouse with a 5-pt star in the door to the left and a crescent moon in the door to the right. I wonder then if the crescent-and-star symbol indicated a unisex toilet? — kwami (talk) 22:37, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Deleted fundamentally erroneous section, "Symbols and stereotypes"

I deleted this section partly because it reads like someone's essay plan but mainly because it is based on a erroneous foundation that has persisted to this day despite being dismissed repeatedly over the past 200 years. These symbols do not refer to the 'shield and spear of Mars or Venus's looking glass', they are evolutions of the initial letters of the Greek names of the planets. For an explanation, see the New Scientist article by Dr. William Stearn. Consequently, the citations supporting the material I deleted fail the wp:reliable source test. There is certainly a need for some material on the symbolism but this is not it. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 15:54, 24 May 2020 (UTC)

Actually, Stearn was very likely wrong about that. But it's off-topic for this article anyway, a content fork of the same speculations in the planetary symbols article, which are more up to date. — kwami (talk) 04:07, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Links to phallic male and female symbols like in Celtic and Scandinavian, and all over the world?

What is the scientific name for these? I assume there are wikipages to them. Shouldn't this article hold links to them? e.g. https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/history-and-civilisation/2020/02/exploring-britains-landscapes-of-love-and-lust and Yoni. Thy, SvenAERTS (talk) 14:57, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

The article calls them fertility symbols, not gender symbols. "Gender symbols" are a form of shorthand whereas these have far more extensive associations. But certainly worth listing in See Also if not already there. (Lingam and yoni are just Sanskrit names for penis and vulva). So not an obvious omission to my eye but others may disagree? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 16:14, 13 September 2020 (UTC)

Unicode

Part of the reason why this article was not formerly fully sourced to Unicode was that Unicode defined U26A4 as "bisexuality", while in the real world this is used much more often to mean "heterosexuality". But from what's linked to from the article now, it seems that Unicode has fixed this... AnonMoos (talk) 18:01, 3 December 2020 (UTC)

Unicode is not a RS for anything other than Unicode. I reduced the table to symbols covered in this article (the rest is now at LGBT symbols) and changed the wording to what is on the Unicode charts. But we shouldn't suggest that is in any way authoritative as to what the symbols mean or what the wording for gender should be: it's just a guide for which characters to choose for which symbols. For example, Unicode doesn't define which triangle should be used for 'male'. The white triangle is noted as the one to use for "trine" (the astrological aspect), which is a simple triangle; the elemental symbol for fire is a very similar triangle, but in some versions has decorative details added, which wouldn't be appropriate for the male symbol in a kinship chart.

It wouldn't matter, really, whether 'bisexuality' had been corrected to 'heterosexuality' or not, because Unicode doesn't determine how symbols are used. There are other misleading things in the Unicode charts; you wouldn't expect from Unicode that the 'transsexual' symbol, for example, would be used for unisex bathrooms. There are plenty of errors in other fields -- for example, Unicode has the palatal and alveolar click letters reversed relative to modern usage -- and people ignore them as irrelevant. — kwami (talk) 03:58, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I know all about certain Unicode idiosyncrasies (the Hebrew-alphabet diacritics were given completely wrong "combining class" assignments in the early 1990s, which caused problems displaying pointed Hebrew texts in certain software programs using certain fonts well into the 21st century, but because such assignments are "immutable", the dumb obvious errors must be propagated unchanged into eternity, without any corrections being possible). But I'm not sure that there's any big problem with referring to Unicode in this article where the meaning listed for a character in the Unicode standard is unproblematic. However, "bisexuality" is most definitely not the most common or well-known meaning for U26A4, which caused a problem back when it was the only meaning listed for the character in Unicode... AnonMoos (talk) 20:23, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

I think I've got the Unicode stuff worded in a way now that doesn't imply it's anything other than Unicode. If something's really divergent from common usage, we could add a fn clarifying it, but the fact that what we say are male and female symbols (in genealogies) Unicode just calls a 'white square' and 'white circle' makes it pretty obvious that the real-world uses of a symbol are not dependent on the Unicode definition. And the table now speaks of "associated wording" rather than "associated meanings" to reinforce that point. — kwami (talk) 22:17, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Ah, I think I found the problem. In botany, perfect flowers, symbolized ⚥, are more often called 'bisexual' these days than 'hermaphroditic'. — kwami (talk) 03:41, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

March 2021

We need to add the cis and trans gender signs to this article -- 15:28, 8 March 2021 71.195.245.66

I'm not sure what those would be. Flags would not be relevant to this article. AnonMoos (talk) 00:19, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

The table already contains these. What extra is being sought? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:35, 9 March 2021 (UTC)

"⚧️" listed at Redirects for discussion

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect ⚧️. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 March 10#⚧️ until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion. –MJL ‐Talk‐^☖ 18:24, 10 March 2021 (UTC)

Rd'd to LGBT symbols, along with half a dozen other rd's here, as that's where it's discussed. — kwami (talk) 03:50, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Good solution. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 20:31, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Origins of planetary symbols

...don't belong here and I deleted the para. It was a WP:FORK of planetary symbol and related articles. Also, the Stearns ref we had was dated and now known to be wrong: only Jupiter and Saturn are known to derive from abbreviations (zeta + stroke and kappa-rho + stroke, respectively). Mercury is universally thought to be a caduceus, and Mars very likely a spear and shield (early forms were just an arrow shape, maybe a spear but hard to tell what it was). Venus is unclear; a hand mirror is as good a guess as any, but we really don't know.

Also, Mars and Venus were not always iron and copper. In one early source, Mars was copper. Only gold, silver and lead for the Sun, Moon and Saturn are invariable in surviving mss. — kwami (talk) 03:48, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Comments I made in various places above about iron spears vs. bronze hand-mirrors were not really about the origins of the symbols, but how they were interpreted over long periods of time... AnonMoos 20:32, 18 December 2021 (UTC)

Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing more refs for the Venus symbol deriving from her necklace. So far I've only seen mention of that 1934 pub, which I haven't accessed yet. Looking at pix of the 2nd-c engraving, I can't say I see a necklace myself, though that might just be a problem with the image quality. — kwami (talk) 03:46, 19 December 2021 (UTC)

Rendering the toilet facilities pictograms in different colours

@Kwamikagami: just a note re your recent edits that added ︎ after the pictogram: on Chrome, I see no difference with or without. It looks like the default font only has an emoji-like rendering. In both {{char|🚹︎}} [with variation selector] and {{char|🚹}} [without], I see a white figure on a square blue background. Perhaps it is different with Safari or Bing?

BTW, I also tried this syntax <span style="colour:red">🚺</span> to try to change the background to red, woth no effect (and then decided it was trivia anyway and dropped the whole idea).

This is just an FYI to save you repeating the exercise unless you really want to. Otherwise no reply expected. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 18:35, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

For me, the plain characters display as blue and red emojis, whereas the VS forces them to display as black and white text. If you see an emoji regardless, then you probably don't have a font installed that supports them as text. Ideally, they should display as text unless you use a VS to make them emojis, but it doesn't always work that way.

I wouldn't expect adding a color tag to have any effect on an emoji, since they come in pre-set colors. I tried the color tag on the text variant of the symbol, but that didn't make any difference either, at least for me. Don't know why. — kwami (talk) 18:40, 6 June 2022 (UTC)

"Associated wording"

Rather than keep changing the article, let's see if we can agree an ultra-succinct wording for that column heading.

• On past experience, the simple "Associated wording" seems somehow to invite well-meaning IP editors to 'improve' the text.
• "Unicode associated wording" doesn't seem to work much better.
• "Unicode-given associated wording" is not accurate: the wording is given by the Unicode Consortium
• "Unicode Consortium-given associated wording" is accurate but dire

How about "Meaning assigned by Unicode Consortium"? (Is "meaning" the correct word in this context?) John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:39, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

"Associated wording in Unicode Standard" or "Associated Unicode Standard wording"? — kwami (talk) 20:38, 30 June 2022 (UTC)

@John Maynard Friedman I'm unsure what to do here, and it's not aided by the fact that this is slightly bikeshed-y now that I think of it.

I made the Unicode-given edit assuming "Unicode" can also refer to the Unicode Consortium, but I mostly agree with your other points. I don't know which terminology is accurate ("associated wording", "meaning", or etc.), so I might check Unicode documents later. I'm also split on whether to simply re-add the "the assoc. wording here is from Unicode" footnote.

For now, I lean towards Associated Unicode Standard wording (what Kwamikagami recommended) or Unicode Standard associated wording as I think that including "standard" clarifies even more that the wording is from Unicode documents. LightNightLights ^(talk) 07:05, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I like Associated Unicode Standard wording too, so I declare a consensus! --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:04, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

Potential contradiction

Under the "Public toilets" section, an image of a Swiss public toilet is labeled "Biological gender symbols on a public toilet in Switzerland". Typically gender is seen as a social concept, and sex is biological. This is a minute detail but I suggest the removal of the word "biological" from the image's label to avoid any unnecessary confusion.

Lumenfre (talk) 05:36, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

But they are biological symbols, and opposed to genealogical. We could change 'gender' to 'sex'. — kwami (talk) 09:02, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

Unfortunately sex symbol is already taken. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 18:16, 24 September 2022 (UTC)

In my experience--because of the societal connection between sex and gender--the Mars and Venus symbols are interchangeable for either sex or gender. The latter point seems to be the consensus based on this article's title, so I think it makes sense that the "Biological" be omitted from the label and keep the rest the way it is. An article title change is a topic for another talk section. Lumenfre (talk) 03:58, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Gender and Culture

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2023 and 18 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Jenjmo (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Jenjmo (talk) 17:42, 31 August 2023 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Graphic Design History

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 28 August 2023 and 15 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Cewb23 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by Ktrachsel01 (talk) 01:07, 18 December 2023 (UTC)

Infobox in Biology and medicine

The infobox with all the symbols is formatted for IPA, so it displays "Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)" as alt-text. I don't know how to fix that, but it's probably worth doing since it will cause confusion with screen readers and similar things. 62.233.204.250 (talk) 23:47, 22 September 2024 (UTC)

"⚧︎" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect ⚧︎ has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2025 January 4 § ⚧︎ until a consensus is reached. Jay 💬 05:13, 4 January 2025 (UTC)

Also ⚲, ⚧️, ⚤, ⚦ and ⚧ are discussed there. Jay 💬 05:14, 4 January 2025 (UTC)