Thread by @FakeUnicode

All the hot takes about gender-neutral emoji (summarized: "THEIR ARE ONLY TO GENDERS, I LERND THAT WHEN I WAS THREE") are mad for the wrong reason. The gender neutral ones just mean "It doesn't matter. This is just a person".

They'll /really/ be pissed when/if enbies are added.

If for some reason you want to see the vitriol, scroll down to the replies for this tweet:

https://twitter.com/emojipedia/status/1188877466615631878

How did we get here? How about a short apocryphal history of Gendered Emoji.

First, a timeline of emoji implementation:

1997: SoftBank
1999: DoCoMo
2002: KDDI
Oct 23, 2008: Gmail
Nov 21, 2008: iOS 2.2
Oct 11, 2010: Unicode
July 9, 2012: Android 4.3
...

Emoji have been unnecessarily* gendered since long before Unicode or Apple got involved.
emojipedia.org/face-massage/
emojipedia.org/information-de…

*(As opposed to, for example:👨👩🚹🚺)

It didn't help that many professions/sports were male, and many emotions/leisure were female.

Apple did nothing to dissuade this, and in fact reinforced this with their high resolution pre-Unicode implementations. Google, bless, really tried in Android 5.0 with their blobs.

Skin tones were a similar problem. Most person emoji were vaguely white in the Softbank sets. EG: emojipedia.org/woman/

Apple of course doubled down. What changed in iOS 8.3 was the introduction of skin tones and suggestion (by Unicode) that base should be "unnatural" (yellow)

Unicode is not blameless. When introducing gender-balancing ZWJ sequences, they didn't stipulate the base should be neutral. EG 🤷 has generally been a carbon copy of male or female glyphs. Until now.
emojipedia.org/shrug/
emojipedia.org/woman-shruggin…
emojipedia.org/man-shrugging/

And for some sequences, where the base was the person, gender neutrality wasn't even possible, eg:
👨‍🚀 1f468-200d-1f680 MALE ASTRONAUT
👩‍🚀 1f469-200d-1f680 FEMALE ASTRONAUT
Which are made of:
👨+🚀
👩+🚀

But this later changed with the introduction of:
🧑 1f9d1 ADULT

There've been many proposals over the years to get Unicode/Apple to fix this, like
unicode.org/L2/L2017/17232… [@CharlotteBuff]
unicode.org/L2/L2019/19078… [@jenniferdaniel]
unicode.org/L2/L2019/19189… [@jenniferdaniel]

With Emoji 12.1 many of the gaps are triaged. But there's always more.

Some contentious ones: 🧕👰🤰🤵🤱
The permanent codepoint names are:
🧕 1f9d5 PERSON WITH HEADSCARF
👰 1f470 BRIDE WITH VEIL
🤰 1f930 PREGNANT WOMAN
🤵 1f935 MAN IN TUXEDO
🤱 1f931 BREAST-FEEDING
But these can be changed in CLDR shortnames/translations: unicode.org/cldr/charts/la…