Transgender Emojis Coming Soon, Erasing Male Or Female Bias

Like Facebook, which expanded its gender identification by offering choices beyond the traditional male or female, change is coming soon to emojis. According to the draft emoji list of Unicode, there would be three gender inclusive emoji, which would come to phones by the end of 2017. Rather than focus on the gender, the new emojis would depict a child, adult and older person.

The three emojis “with gender inclusive attributes” would be open to interpretation if the emoji selected is a male or female “without implying masculine or feminine gender explicitly,” Mashable reports. The three proposed emojis have the same template but with some minor changes. The child and adult share a common hairstyle which is short enough to be sported by a male or female, but the lips of the child are open. The older person emoji has gray instead of brown hair and wears eyeglasses.

Paul Hunt, a typeface designer and font developer at Adobe, proposed the new emojis to Unicode Consortium. Hunt, a member of the emoji subcommittee of the consortium, called his proposal Unicode’s “Emoji Version 5.0” list that has a planned mid-2017 release period. In a blog post, Hunt explains that he made the changes since not everyone identifies as male or female. Some see themselves as a bit of the two genders, or neither or something else. But regardless of how they identify their preferred gender, he hopes they could find adequate ways to express themselves in the new emojis.

However, Ars Technica reports that Unicode Consortium plans to support 11 other professional emojis to promote gender equality. The new set, Unicode 9.0 was finalized in June, but Unicode 10.0 would not be final until June 2017. It would depict men and women performing the job of a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher and rockstar.

Hunt, in his blog post titled “What is Gender and Why Does it Matter to Emoji,” says the upcoming emojis would fill out the middle-of-the-gender spectrum for the post-gender generation, Heat Street reports.