Apple's new gender neutral emojis | Hacker News Reader

Apple's new gender neutral emojis

itsnicethat.com

15 pointskawera40 comments

I guess we lost the universal purpose of the original smiley. It's yellow and looks like nobody in particular, so that it could represent anybody...

Or even better, the original smileys such as:

;)

...and my favorite :3

These are gender neutral and timeless.

Or the older ones for the PLATO system: http://www.platopeople.com/emoticons.html

Thanks to the 20+ years of The Simpsons, yellow is often used to explicitly indicate white people.

Often? Where else is it used besides The Simpsons?

There have been over 600 episodes of The Simpsons—that by itself is an “often”.

Cool, I like them. The mermaid and rock climbing ones are good additions too.

On a related note, it's nice to see Mark Bramhill's Person in Lotus Position on this page. He has a nice 3-part podcast series on what it takes to make an emoji:

https://www.macintosh.fm/episodes/emoji-1

And 99% invisible did a nice summary interview with him:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/person-lotus-position...

Can we go back to just making arbitrary pictures from text?

Nothing PC to get offended about and infinite possibilities (up to the limits of RAM of course).

Aren't most emoji gender neutral?

Are these in unicode already, or are they really Apple specific?

"Apple has revealed" is far different from "The Unicode consortium has decided."

Apple co-chairs the Unicode committee on emoji.

Yes, and how would new emoji become part of the Unicode standard in secret, such that the corporate reveal would be on the same day it was added to Unicode?

I wonder who's actually going to use the breastfeeding emoji.

Nursing mothers and family of nursing mothers.

I wonder if Unicode will eventually just contain every conceivable image that anyone would ever want to reference.

Yeah... I feel like emojis were a mistake.

emoji weren't a mistake (given unicode's goal of being able to represent all possible written text), expanding them beyond the original set was.

A huge number of people have children during their lifetime (89% according to one quora answer [0]), and since babies require daily breastfeeding multiple times a day for at least six months, that's a lot of instances of people needing to talk about breastfeeding.

[0]: https://www.quora.com/Children-What-percentage-of-people-bec...

My point is emojis help us visualize things - try to give us an actual image instead of a word. But I imagine lots of people don't in particular want other people to visualize them breastfeeding.

lots of people don't want others to visualize them dancing but the dancing emoji just isn't for them.

Did we finally get a dumpling emoji?

Apple signaling its boundless virtue as usual.

It is ironic that gender is someone's own choice of who they choose to identify as, but Apple seems to be reinforcing that what you look like determines what gender you must be.

What's even more ironical is that if gender is someone's choice, then what does one mean when "it" choose to dress as a woman ?

*they

It's not clear why you put "it" in quotes or used the term "it" which generally doesn't refer to a person.

i guess we should invent a new english word for neither a male nor a female yet a human being... i'm not english so i don't know what's the usage.

"they" is the commonly used gender neutral pronoun in English.

Ah sorry I should have elaborated more.

So in English politically correct culture calling transgender people "it" is not considered OK. Things that are "it" aren't people. You can use they/them or refer to the person or group by name.

I'd say it's maybe a tick or two below dropping the n-bomb or using whatever the racist term du jour is for a some group. It's not at the same level because a lot of people still don't know that using "it" implies that someone doesn't have personhood.

There are people who refer to transgender persons as "it" in anger and disgust because they don't want to acknowledge someone else's choice of gender and the things that drive that decision like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_dysphoria.

Caveat. I am really not an expert at the whole transgender thing. I'm as tall, cis, white, and male as they come.

It means that person wants to wear a dress.

It doesn't mean that person is a women, nor does it mean that person is a man.

wearing some clothes instead of another never made you change your gender, did it ? You could say " i'm a man that likes to wear dresses" without denying being of a "male" gender...

I believe that is the intent of my reply to bsaul's comment, yes.

In this case it appears that bsaul didn't realize that "it", especially in quotes like that, is used as a slur against non-gender conforming people.

So I'll reword it this way: a gender-neutral emoji in a dress is a gender-neutral emoji in a dress. It can mean whatever the author and readers interpret it to mean. The meaning can be highly context sensitive.

We all signal virtue through any action. Not including these emoji is also signaling virtue. What do you recommend they do? It is not in their best interest as a global and publicly traded company to be intentionally exclusive.

Monochromatic signaling their boundless virtue as usual, with low effort comments. See how your comment is also meant to signal virtue to people who use the phrase virtue signaling?

The real question is: what harm has been done to you by Apple including trans and ambiguously gendered people? It makes them happier and feel more included, which is a moral good and a rare ethical low-hanging fruit.

"Virtue Signalling" is just the new snarl word for "SJW".

Anyone relying on using this essentially meaningless phrase (SJW, virtue signalling, or other snarl words) to label something is intentionally being dismissive in a derogatory manner, and is not really worth engaging.

e: see their intentional strawman below for further proof

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Social_justice_warrior#.22Virt...

>anyone who disagrees isn’t worth talking to

Ok.

Want to prove them wrong, monochromatic? I'm listening.

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