Exclusive: Google releases 53 gender fluid emoji
[As emojis] become more inclusive, each becomes less universal. Jennifer Daniel, designer at Google, thinks about this deep irony at the heart of visual language all the time. She traces it back to the age-old problem with the male bathroom symbol. "That person could be man, woman, anyone," she says. "But they had to add a little detail, that dress, and suddenly that person symbol doesn't mean person anymore; it means man. And that culture means a man-centered culture."
While Daniel can't fix our bathroom signage, as the director of Android emojis, she can fix another problem: The lack of gender-neutral symbols in texting. She can give us the zombies, merpeople, children, weightlifters that are neither male nor female. "We're not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji–and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants," says Daniel. "But you can create something that feels more inclusive."
Google is launching 53 updated, gender ambiguous emoji as part of a beta release for Pixel smartphones this week (they'll come to all Android Q phones later this year). Whether Google calls them "non-binary" or not, they have been designed to live between the existing male and female emoji and recognize gender as a spectrum. Given that Google collaborates with many of its rivals on emoji, it's likely that Apple and others will release their takes on genderless emoji later this year.
Daniel sits on the Unicode consortium–the organization that sets core emoji standards, including signifiers like gender and other details, that designers at Apple, Google, and other companies then follow to create their emoji. Last year, she pointed out that there were 64 emoji that, according to Unicode's standards, were never meant to signify gender. In fact, 11 don't have a Unicode-defined signifier for male or female at all–like baby, kiss, fencing person, and snowboarder. As for the remaining 53, they could be male, female, or neither.
Yet Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and, yes, Google, have often assigned genders with their designs for these emoji. It's why every construction worker across major operating systems is, by default, is a man. Unicode's standards dictated a construction "person," but tech companies decided to design them as construction men (and add women as a secondary option).
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(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:22PM (4 children)
My device is already seething with emojis, how can we opt out?
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Saturday May 11 2019, @04:52PM (2 children)
The ride never ends. 🚂🎢☠
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1) by DECbot on Sunday May 12 2019, @03:53PM (1 child)
Anybody up for writing the technical requirements for rehash to keep the Unicode support but drop emojis?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday May 13 2019, @12:07PM
Pretty sure the ranges are documented. Wouldn't take half an hour even considering finding the right spot to put the code.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday May 11 2019, @05:14PM
My immediate thoughts are browse in elinks with a terminal that doesn't support them or write a GreaseMonkey script to scrub them.