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posted by martyb on Saturday May 11 2019, @03:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the s/he dept.

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).

Related: Unicode Considering 67 New Emoji for 2016
Unicode 9.0 Serves up Bacon Emoji, 71 others, and Six New Scripts
Unicode 10.0's New Emojis
Stink Over Frowning Poo Emoji at the Unicode Consortium
Microsoft Briefly Left Holding the Gun Emoji
Unicode Consortium Adding 230 New Emojis in Emoji 12.0


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by julian on Saturday May 11 2019, @09:08PM (1 child)

    by julian (6003) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 11 2019, @09:08PM (#842478)

    You're either ignorant of the meta-issue or being disingenuous. The white-nationalists and adjacent allies deliberately exploit the ambiguity and plausible deniability of the sign. They're playing a game. Sartre, someone who I am not usually much a fan of, figured this out a long time ago. Though he was speaking specifically of antisemitism and antisemites, and words not symbols (which isn't actually much of a distinction) he said the last word on this subject and his insight is perfectly transferable to this specific case:

    Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @10:14PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 11 2019, @10:14PM (#842498)

    I'm not ignorant, the only people claiming that sign as a white power sign is the media, it wasn't until after the media asserted the connection to those groups that it started to spread and in most cases is more accurately connected with trolling rather than an actual hand signal.

    Yes, they do often times take advantage of ambiguity, but this isn't one of those cases.