Gender symbols and the Sekushii font
December 27, 2002
Gender symbol fonts
¶
The truetype world probably is most acquainted with
Marvin Vogel's useful (and free!) symbol font
Marvosym,
which contains symbols for sexless, male, female and
hermaphrodite. Marvin recognizes that there are
other people in this world besides straight males
or females, but the symbol he suggests for hermaphrodites
is not the one used by or suggested by the world of
sex experts [read on below].
Curtis Clark
made the free font called Female and Male Symbols (1996),
which contains the same gender symbols as Marvosym.
¶
WordPerfect's WP IconicSymbolsA (1993) just has a male and
a female symbol.
¶
There are, of course, a number of commercial outfits that have
the standard pair of gender symbols in some of their fonts.
Particularly artistic are P22's
Koch Signs 3 and Koch Signs 4. Whether by design or accident, these also have
a glyph for hermaphrodites.
An even more complete set is Ann's Astro
family of fonts from Dingbatcave (Ann Stretton), at 10 dollars per style.
¶
Unicode
has reserved position 9792 for the female sign, and 9794 for the male sign.
Nothing is reserved for the others. Some Unicode fonts indeed do have
these two characters.
However, no Unicode font has more than this bare minimum, and
thus, the Unicode path is a cul-de-sac.
¶
So, that is the current state of affairs.
The world's gay community started using their own symbols, derived from
those for male (the symbol for Mars)
and female (the symbol for Venus). But, not to be left out,
the bisexuals, both male and female by birth, suggested their
own glyphs.
Outnumbered but not outgunned,
the hermaphrodites picked their own
symbol, that of Mercury.
But it does not end there.
The transexuals do not fit into any of the above
categories, so they have their own symbols.
Transgendered people are usually defined as those
who are aware of all people of all sexual orientations
and preferences, and approach relationships in a gender-free
manner. Well, they have their own symbol.
I never located the symbol for eunuchs, but I am sure there
must be one.
Of course, the combinations multiply. However,
I refuse to create symbols for
gay hermaphrodites,
transsexuals who like eunuchs,
and males who had two sex change operations (to
get back to where they started from).
¶
If you have a special request though, send it to me,
and I will see if I can make a font for you. Always for
free, of course.
¶
I was struck by the lack of complete fonts with gender symbols.
The TeX/Metafont community lives with Denis Roegel's
Genealogy
font, created in 1996 and updated in 1999.
Denis Roegel
essentially
compiled the genealogical symbols found in
Roland Waldi's Wasy
font (1992), which has a male and female symbol set,
and Knuth's "gen" font, and added the standard symbols
for males and females.
The symbols
¶
The ultimate place for symbols is the highly recommended site
Symbols.com.
For definitions of transsexual, transgender, bisexual,
and other terms, see here.
Some symbols are
shown here.
Official books always lag behind, so I went looking
for what people actually use to represent different
sexual orientations, preferences and situations.
At present, the world seems to agree on the following symbols:
Mars, or Tuesday: symbol for males. Venus, or Friday: symbol for females. Gay males. Gay males. Lesbians. Aware of the joint cause of gays and lesbians.
Also (sometimes) transsexuals.
Also, quite universally in science, used for hermaphrodites. See here. Symbol.com states that it is used in botany for double-sexed plants.
Also, (sometimes) heterosexuals in general.
See here
or here. Bisexuals.
Sometimes used for people fighting
for gay and lesbian rights. Transgender. See here. Another symbol for transgender: see here. Bisexuals. Bisexuals, as proposed here. Closely related in some places to the symbol for bisexual men. Bisexual women. Mercury, or Wednesday: Hermaphrodites. See here. The Greek equivalent of Mercury is Hermes, hence the name. Apparently, biologists use this for hermphrodites.
The Sekushii font
¶ The Sekushii font is part of the Sugaku series. It has all the symbols above, in many sets, both light and medium weight. There are straight-arrowed sets for combining with sans serif text, flared arrows for serif text, and fun experiments and extensions with various sexual undertones. And, it is free! Have a ball.
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Copyright © 2002
Luc Devroye
School of Computer Science
McGill University
Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6
luc@cs.mcgill.ca
http://cg.scs.carleton.ca/~luc/index.html