As of Thursday, iPhone users who chose to install the iOS 15.4 beta update will now have an array of new emojis, including those such as the "pregnant man" and "pregnant person," Audrey Conklin reported for FOX Business. There's a whole new "person" category in addition to men and women as well.
Such biology-denying emojis created for the sake of inclusivity have been available from Emojipedia as of last September. The announcement was made in July, as I covered at the time.
According to a September 15, 2021 blog post from Jane Solomon with Emojipedia:
Released this week by the Unicode Consortium as part of Emoji 14.0, the new pregnancy options may be used for representation by trans men, non-binary people, or women with short hair—though, of course, use of these emojis is not limited to these groups.
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There's no one right or wrong way to use an emoji, and the addition of these new emojis reflect an ongoing effort to standardize the options available on the emoji keyboard, making it more consistent and inclusive at the same time.
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As new human emojis have been released, Unicode has made an effort to be inclusive with gender, especially in recent years. The approach has varied depending on the situation, though the general goal is to standardize inconsistencies in legacy decisions.
A Saturday editorial from Jason Snively with AppleInsider addressed "How we ended up with the 'Pregnant Man' Emoji," which sought to provide quite the thorough and technical explanation as to how these emojis came about.
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He also discusses the outrage, claiming it's "over a fairly logical system." And he could not be missing the point anymore if he tried:
The level of vitriol and outrage I have seen surrounding something as innocuous as an emoji has been awful. The headlines I've noticed that I feel obligated not to link back to, combined with the malice ascribed directly towards people due to their political leaning, gender, or sexual orientation, gave me enough pause to spend my night writing this.
I know this is the internet, and outrage is the currency. At the end of the day, we're just talking about a digital stacking system to build multiple emoji from core elements instead of a custom element for each of the thousands of emoji that now exist.
No one should be getting threats over emojis. And we're pretty sure we will get some from this article from folks that don't want to read it and are too comfortable with their outrage to read.
If you see someone out there get angry because a pregnant man "isn't scientific!" then link them to this article. If you see someone blaming Apple for pushing an agenda, then show them this article. If you see someone praising Apple for pandering or being forward-thinking, then link them to this article.
Apple employs some of the people that worked on this, but don't have any illusions that the company put its foot down and demanded this particular chorded emoji combination out of tens of thousands.
They have discussions and work collectively with others as a group. There are more people outside of Apple that made this decision than there are participants from the company, by a factor of about 10.
The emoji combination was assembled with not an iota of identity politics. The fact that it exists is no more of an ideologically-planted flag than stacking three Lego bricks together.
While such an explanation or at least the effort to provide one may be appreciated by some, it's worth noting that the issue doesn't lie with coding, but with a denial of biology and promoting such a denial. Of course nobody should be getting threats, but that isn't the point.
It's worth noting that at no point does Snively discuss the "scientific" aspects about men getting pregnant. This is in part because he is dedicated to discussing the technical aspects of emojis, but also because the biological and scientific reality is that only women can get pregnant.
A much better take on the "pregnant man" emoji came from Bill Maher during Friday night's episode of "Real Time," as Landon highlighted earlier on Saturday.
Tucker Carlson also discussed the pregnant man emoji in the context of mocking misinformationists.
In the real world, men can very easily get pregnant if they don’t take proper precautions. Watch out, guys. It could happen to you. Apple’s new iPhone update includes a reminder of this: a pregnant man emoji. pic.twitter.com/2oyl8BW1aZ
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) January 29, 2022
All iPhone users will have such emojis later this year.
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