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Comment by ender341341 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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