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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.

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