this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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[Outdated, please look at pinned post] Casual Conversation
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Ah yeah, the Unicode Consortium ran into an issue a while back where they realized their emoji descriptors weren’t specific enough and were leading to confusion in cross-platform conversations. Apple used to have a woman in a red dress for “Dancer”, while most Android distributions showed a man in a disco suit. They started getting more specific in their emoji definitions and in 2016 and introduced a few emoji pairs like “Woman Dancing” and “Man Dancing” to clear up the existing confusion.
By 2019 the emoji concepts which were gendered (dancing, etc.) and non-gendered (skiing, surfing, etc.) had become pretty arbitrary. They decided to standardize offering a male, female, and generic version of every human emoji. It’s, you know, a standard, so they generally don’t make that many exceptions. Even emoji like “Santa Claus” have a female “Mrs. Claus” and a generic “Claus” options.
Plus some trans men can still get pregnant so it's not like it's that ludicrous an inclusion.
Hell yeah. 🙌
To expand on that, the way they decided to implement emoji in a simple, flexible and extendable way, was to combine emoji codes.
You have the code for pregnant person and combine it with the code for the male or female symbol emoji, to make the pregnant man or women emoji. So in a way, it's easier to support all variations than only some.
Words to live by really
They also did the same regarding race. Used to be that person emojis were always non-descript in that regard. Most implementations used Simpsons-yellow skin, and Android used a green, non-humanoid character.
Nowadays, the more recent human emojis tend to have a bunch of realistic skin tone options as well as Simpsons-yellow default, but they haven't gone back and made those options for many of the older emojis.