The Week in Woke: Pregnant Man Emoji edition

As someone who follows what’s going on with the Unicode consortium, mainly (though mot exclusively) because of emoji, I can report that these emoji aren’t meant to represent pregnancy specifically, but “swollen bellies”. The justification is, because the pregnant woman emoji is sometimes used to represent the situation of “wow I ate way too much and boy am I full” (AKA “I’m having a food baby”), there should be a full range of gender options for it. The fact that it can also be used for pregnant transmen and nonbinary people like the media is going to be making a big deal out of is just a side benefit; if that was the only use, then it wouldn’t have been seen as high enough priority to include justify including yet. While the Unicode Consortium is theoretically dedicated to inclusiveness, due to the issue of “emoji bloat” the majority considers “predicted level of usage” to be a more important consideration in the short run.

In which case one might wonder “then why was ‘bearded woman’ included in the previous release, as you’d think that would be even lower priority?” that was because it was released as part of a larger set of general inclusiveness which involved identical coding and presentation issues. (Due to how it’s handled, the “woman with swollen belly” emoji would not necessarily have been done the same way.) As all of the other emoji of that exact type were high priority, so it was a “we might as well” situation.

Note also that while the various two-person emoji come in M/M, M/F, F/F, and N/N versions (except the wrestlers, which have just M/M and F/F versions, and the hugging emoji, which is in silhouette to avoid having to encode every combination of race and gender) the majority opinion puts adding in N/M and N/F combinations to be very low priority at present. The reasoning is that the most common use for the N and N/N emojis are by cis people to represent someone nonspecific rather than Nonbinary people using them as a form of self-representation, so they don’t believe that N/M and N/F combinations would see enough use to justify their immediate inclusion. There is a minority faction which considers the arguments for the “likely” lack of usage to be weak and based on cis privilege, and also isn’t fond of the “level of likely usage” prioritization to be a good approach when it comes to matters of inclusiveness, but they’ve been fighting that battle for at least the past three years to no avail.

Finally, note that they have no intention of expanding on the various “family” emoji. (Technically there’s an official way of adding skin tones to them, but it’s messy and most systems won’t support it. There’s also no official way to add nonbinary people, babies, 3+ parents, or 3+children.) Rather, they’ve stated that they intend to declare them “officially depreciated” sometime in the next few years (no specific date planned yet), meaning that they’ll remain in Unicode, but recommended that they be made unavailable to standard emoji keyboards and dropped from general usage. They say people should instead just use a string of individual icons to represent their families, or just the general concept of “family”, if someone wishes to do so.

TL;DR the above is all about present and future planned emoji releases, including the new “pregnant” emojis.

In terms of Colin Kaepernick it is more like the NFL is trying to distract from rather than make up for. Unless I am missing something he is still being blacklisted and they never mention his name at all when doing this kind of thing.

So woke folk, especially Coke, may go broke because some bloke (fired after non-consensual poke ‘n stroke and stoked by Koch) spoke about how they’ll choke and croak under that yoke.

What a joke.

They believe it is all about how you feel. If you feel like a woman, but were born a man – then simply change your gender. 

Do they think a pregnant man emoji is meant to represent a pregnant trans woman?

That said, if conservatives are mad about reality being shaped around feelings, they should probably be scolding the National Review over their recent post about how anti-vaxxers won’t get the vaccine because they feel disrespected.

@weirwoodtreehugger

For real, terfs and conservatives all forget that trans men exists. they all think for some reason that all trans men are 12 year old girls who are either confused lesbians or Tom boys, I have never seen either side even acknowledge that that there are trans men that are adults.

Yeah, it seems that they’re thinking of trans women instead of men, from what they wrote.

And since when do transphobes care if emojis represent reality? I don’t hear them complaining that eyes can’t literally turn into star & heart shapes.

@Snowberry – That’s actually really interesting!

I never though much about how emojis were decided until I read a book called Because Internet (basically, sociolinguistics of Internet communication for a popular audience) and even that only talks about the Unicode consortium briefly (far as I remember).

@Amadaun: standing ovation

I’ll believe the NFL is sincere when they apologize to and pay Kaep.

@GSS ex-noob

*bows*

I couldn’t resist.

God, the constant whining from the right is so tiresome.