text: In his books  (1767) and  (1771), Carl Linnaeus regularly used the planetary symbols of Mars, Venus and Mercury, , for male, female and hermaphroditic (perfect) flowers, respectively. Botanists now use  for the last.
  In genealogy, including kinship in anthropology and pedigrees in animal husbandry, the geometric shapes  or  are used for male and  for female. These are also used on public toilets in some countries.
  The modern international pictograms used to indicate male and female public toilets,  and , became widely used in the 1960s and 1970s. They are sometimes abstracted to  for male and  for female.
  Biology and medicine
  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. (Most flowering and conifer plant species are hermaphroditic and either bear flowers/cones that themselves are hermaphroditic, or bear both male and female flowers/cones on the same plant.) These symbols are now ubiquitous in biology and medicine to indicate the sex of an individual, for example of a patient.