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Comment by bXVsbGVy | Hacker News Reader

I find fascinating that many of those were rejected, but "Pregnant man" and male bride were approved.

https://emojiguide.com/people-body/man-with-veil/

My only mildly knowledgeable guess would be that those are more "pregnant person" and as part of the work to add gender modifiers to emojis they just added male/female versions of a whole block that happened to include those.

Would definitely love if the linked chart had a reason for rejection column

The "Pregnant Person" is another, different, variant!

https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-person/

https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-man/

https://emojipedia.org/pregnant-woman/

Right. Because the system is to have woman, man, and neutral for everything. Saves debate for more important things.

My issue is with those emojis is that they don't meet a few of their own criteria for a new emoji to be accepted.

Their guideline: https://unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html#selection_factors_i...

For instance, they suggest using "elephant" to evaluate the usage:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all_2008&gprop...

Uneducated guess--somewhere someone will have archived the discussion--but I wonder if the technical complexity was also a factor. If you've made the combining characters for gender, and you've designated which characters can combine with them, but you didn't plan for characters that must be combined only in certain ways, then you're looking at having to specify all that out, and then implementers will have do their thing, and it just... wasn't worth it.

Uneducated guess, though.

EDIT: Googled. Here is a person who knows what was up: https://jenniferdaniel.substack.com/p/did-someone-say-new-em...

The submission guidelines have changed over time. I would assume that, at the time, the proposals _did_ meet the guidelines.

The proposal has a section comparing the frequencies for "pregnant-man" and "pregnant-person" with "elephant". It was a criteria back then.

https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20190r-swollen-belly-emoji....

Most (if not all) gender neutral emojis were proposed by the same person.

The party in power wins by default on the little stuff. The opposition must "save their debate for more important things."

I don't know who is opposed other than those that want to pretend that pregnant transmen don't exist.

But that's not the system. They should be sticking to consistently using the ZWJ + gender to modify a base emoji and they aren't. Consuming three codepoints when one will do is silly.

No, they were deliberately added in: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17232-gender-gap.pdf

There's some evidence of support at the end of it, many of which were angry Twitter posts. Some of those posts seem like satire/shitposts, but it's hard to say without context.

Look up proposal L2/20-190. They provide a number of good reasons for pregnant man. To summarize:

- It avoids gender stereotyping of men in Parenthood.

- couples say "we are pregnant". The term pregnant is culturally used for men too as their search shows.

- the emoji is not just for pregnancy, it is also for feeling bloated, full, and hungry.

I sometimes used this emoji for saying that I'm expecting something. My partner didn't like it.

She is Creative Director for Android and Google.

Except all of those things is NOT what the actual emoji conveys.

Ooh you are going to be so mad when you find out people use to talk about so something other than the purple vegetable...

The problem is that the definition of the emoji says Pregnant Man Emoji.

So using it for anything other than that defeats accessibility for visually impaired people.

Also, 'we are pregnant' is weird, being pregnant is the act of developing offspring within the body.

Just like how eggplant and peach emoji are used for representing things other than fruit and vegetables, I'd expect pregnant man to find its own niche in time. It doesn't take a genius to guess that it will be used by a lot of guys who just ate an enormous burrito.

Why is it appropriate for you to suggest how guys will use that emoji, but it’d be wrong for me to suggest how girls may learn to use a different emoji?

This is not how the guys I know use this emoji, btw.

Who's saying it's inappropriate? You might want to ask them why.

P.S. To get the joke, you have to be familiar with this specific tweet from almost year ago https://twitter.com/jeremyburge/status/1503921387484114944?l... I guess you had to be there.

You make a compelling argument. I have reconsidered my position and am now on board with the pregnant man emoji.

Agreed. But bearded women will likely only be used to bully.

"It is time for the UTC to own up to their mistakes. This whole ordeal has gone on for way too long. I am not asking for much; the solution to this problem is laughably easy. The current gender situation in Unicode is discriminatory, end of discussion. It excludes transgender people by pretending that only women can get pregnant. It excludes non-binary people by treating the third gender option as secondary to male and female, and by neglecting it for virtually all current human- form emoji. It excludes gender non-conforming people by carefully avoiding gendered sequences for characters like BEARDED PERSON."

Source: Analysis of Gender Proposals, https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2017/17439-gender-analysis.pdf

> it excludes gender-non-conforming people by carefully avoiding gendered sequences for characters like BEARDED PERSON.

I don't understand this part. Isn't it a good thing that those emojis lack gendered sequences? Or is it that they should have modifiers to make them appear the way that a person wants to present themselves?

> “by pretending that only women can get pregnant.”

Only women can be impregnated. Stating otherwise does not make it so.

It's hilarious that you're using words to convey this argument. Good one

Poe’s Law

Man with veil looks like a formal wear kaffiyeh.

I feel like they are missing emojis representing amputees of different types.

Also. There is no bald man, or facial hair variations.

But there is a bearded women.

https://emojipedia.org/woman-beard/

I mean some women do have slight facial hair but most want to de-emphasize it.

Their governance seems to lack leadership and just goes with whatever pressure they feel.

There is though.