From Kim Darnell on Facebook, a story from a year ago (4/17/12) about the adoption of a gender-neutral pronoun in Swedish, with this handsome accompanying graphic:
(#1)
The graphic has three interlinked components: The “female symbol” (or “mirror of Venus”), a circle (representing a body) with a cross below it (♀ in biological literature); the “male symbol” (or “spear of Mars”), a circle with an arrow at the upper right (♂ in biological literature); and a plain circle in the center, representing a body unspecified as to sex. Turning to grammatical gender rather than biological sex, the mirror of Venus represents feminine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun hon ‘she’), the spear of Mars the masculine gender (as in the Swedish pronoun han ‘he), and the plain circle the new gender-neutral 3sg Swedish pronoun hen).
A complexity here is that this symbol is sometimes taken to be a transgender symbol, the central circle represeting someone who in some sense is *both* female and male. And for this purpose there are a number of competing symbols.
