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Google's New Emoji Aimed At Promoting Gender Equality Are Coming (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Based largely on a proposal from Unicode Consortium member Google, Unicode Consortium has announced plans to support new emoji aimed at promoting gender equality. There will be "11 new 'professional' emoji [that] will depict both men and women performing different jobs, and there will be both male and female versions of 33 existing emoji that currently depict either a man or a women but not both," writes Ars Technica. "The new professions include, in the Unicode Consortium's words: a farmer, welder, mechanic, health worker, scientist, coder, business worker, chef, student, teacher, and rockstar." What's unusual about the new emoji is that they're created using combinations of existing emoji to avoid waiting for Unicode version 10.0 to be finalized in June of 2017. By using a special "zero-width joiner" (ZWJ) character between two or more emoji, operating systems that support it know to put out a different composite emoji rather than a series of separate emoji. "The new emoji for professions start with either a man or woman emoji, then a ZWJ character, then another character related to the job," reports Ars. "Emoji that were previously one specific gender (the dancing woman or the man running) can be joined to a male or female symbol with a ZWJ character to create emoji of either gender. And all of these emoji can be combined with the existing skin tone modifiers to produce diverse versions of either gender." We may see these combined emoji before the end of the year as software companies begin to integrate them into their operating systems.
Stop releasing fucking emojis for either sex. And Unicode Consortium, stop thinking it's your job to assign characters to arbitrary and ephemeral emojis because it isn't.
Google is a fucking search company.
Emoji's are emoticons and existed in complete form in icq 20 years ago.
And I'm all for gender equality, but this shit is seriously turning to some Jim Jones level shit and people need to get some fucking perspective. Go volunteer at a homeless shelter, christ.
As a trans reader, I feel obligated to say that not all of us are SJWs. A lot of us go about our lives not telling anyone in person about it, except for the people we are dating. Please try not to be influenced by celebrities that are only famous for being related to famous people while being trans. Not long ago, transsexuality was mainly covered as a tabloid Jerry Springer topic, like little people, so they and the media are playing it up for all it's worth.
Transsexuals make up less than 0.3% of the population and get so much more media attention than more deserving causes with that proportion or more: Down syndrome. Hemochromatosis. IBD, which includes ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease. Parkinson's disease. Type I diabetes.
Before I graduated, at my university's Student Union Building there was a family bathroom I usually used first, not because of anything to do with being trans, but because it's usually used less often so it's cleaner, and I like my privacy. Before the NC bathroom headlines, they put a sign to the left of it explicitly saying that anyone could use it, regardless of gender identity. It's more likely the Gay-Straight Alliance lobbied for that, but sometimes I think that bureaucrats are going out of their way to antagonize social conservatives so they can tick off some boxes, and it just counterproductively raised awareness of transsexuals --- as a target for social conservative politicians on the right.
I hope that these words help get across that it's not transsexuals' fault that the media has disproportionate coverage, and a lot of transsexuals would prefer it if there were /less/ awareness and inclusion (when it negatively affects other people, like M2Fs in the Olympics), but you can't exactly raise an awareness campaign about that. I don't usually reply to people, so...please let me know if it did.