There is nothing logical about a pregnant man. Nice attempt to write thousands of words to legitimize it, but a pregnant man emoji is as useful as a emoji of a fish riding a bicycle. Both are pure fantasy.
The reason that we have a Pregnant Man emoji is because some people are born with female reproductive parts but they identify as a man and consider themselves to be a man. You may think that those people shouldn't exist, but they do exist.
This all made perfect sense to me until this section:
The proposed names of the new characters, "man with swollen belly" and "person with swollen belly", are completely semantically detached from the meaning of U+1F930, which is never the case for emoji that form a gender triplet.
This shows a clear preference the a non-existent reality “pregnant man” over the semantic detachment of “swollen belly.”
I’m all for gender fluidity and for people to have the freedom to identify how they want to identify. I honor and appreciate people’s subjective experience.
I also recognize biological sex as an objective reality. With that, biological men can’t get pregnant. Biological women who identify as men, can get pregnant. Both may have swollen bellies for different reasons. But they both can’t be pregnant.
So, logically, the best way to include everyone here and have the emoji serve communication without trying to make a political statement would be to simply rename it swollen belly. That would allow its meaning to be created and interpreted through each use case.
Of course that may not help people who want to be mad, but at least it would be consistent.
I think that you are reading too much into that quote. I don't believe they were trying to make a political statement. It is totally accurate to say that "man with swollen belly" and "person with swollen belly" are completely detached from the meaning of U+1F930 (Pregnant Woman). Of course "person with swollen belly" has a different meaning from "pregnant woman" Why would they have the same meaning?
There is nothing logical about a pregnant man. Nice attempt to write thousands of words to legitimize it, but a pregnant man emoji is as useful as a emoji of a fish riding a bicycle. Both are pure fantasy.
The reason that we have a Pregnant Man emoji is because some people are born with female reproductive parts but they identify as a man and consider themselves to be a man. You may think that those people shouldn't exist, but they do exist.
On a personal level, I agree with that statement. I tried to walk down the middle in the article in hopes that people wouldn't just bomb out halfway through. However, the reality is the emoji mostly exists due to simple beaucracy and adhearence to a system. At least that was the point I was getting at. It's 100% true there is a push within the ESC to be inclusive and representational and I think that should be lauded, but that inclusivity was baked into the system itself.
The 'pregnant man' and the 'pregnant person' emoji exist because they were just filling in the gaps in that system. No one sat down and said "we need to make this emoji to push a specific agenda or ideal." In fact, the original proposition was to not call them pregnant man/person, but that was rejected largely because of something as simple as naming convention.
Most of this article was quite good. Unfortunately, I think it fails its main purpose, which is to explain the actual unicode symbol. I've avoided learning about i18n and l10n as much as I could over the years, so I was quite curious, and having read this I still don't understand.
There are in fact people who identify as male and who would be assumed by anyone who saw them to be biologically male, who nonetheless are or have been pregnant. So if you want to dispute the reality of "Pregnant Man" then you are clearly making a political statement: "I do not recognize those people as male". You would also be ignoring the existence of plenty of non-real symbols like "Unicorn". You could also ask if it's worth specifying an emoji that represents perhaps 1/800000000 of the human population, but you could answer both that that number will go up, and that one might discuss a class without being a member of that class. I will leave such sorry arguments to others as I'm curious here about the engineering.
I would have assumed that the impetus for this symbol is orthogonalization but the article really doesn't make that clear.
[...] though you may still see references to the non-binary option by its CLDR name; "person."
Side note, what is "CLDR"? Is it a typo for "TL;DR"? ...no, Google to the rescue. "Common Locale Data Repository". That could have used some explaining.
On to the main topic:
The more technical of you may know that some emojis do start with a woman or man as the base character instead of a generic person. These are generally a result of emoji that existed in earlier versions of the specification, are part of the exception list, or are more complex and trying to fit in a smaller space. [...] We covered how the system works and why it works that way, but we also established clear exceptions for special-case emojis exist. So why isn't a pregnant woman one of those special gender-specific cases? [...] The original plan, as per standard practice, was to replace the original "Pregnant Woman" emoji (U+1F930) with the non-binary representation and then use the male (U+2642 and U+FE0F) and female (U+2640 and U+FE0F) to modify it to the desired gender. In theory, the system is respected, and everyone is happy.
This makes perfect sense, IF it is the case that the committee is executing a plan to replace all legacy gendered symbols with nongendered ones, which are then modified with male or female codes when desired. Is that actually the case? The article doesn't make that clear, though it seems to be implied by the "The original plan" statement.
To ensure the integrity of existing gendered emoji and to preserve a long runway for future additions, "person" based emoji should never be encoded with a sex symbol. As such, the "person" and "man" variants' are in the process of being added as atomic characters
In other words, due to the legacy use of the emoji and the importance of gender in its meaning, coupled with no modifier for non-binary because it's supposed to be the default, we are instead getting two additional independent variants. "Pregnant Man" (U+1FAC3) and "Pregnant Person" (U+1FAC4) will live alongside the original "Pregnant Woman" (U+1F930), breaking with convention.
This is where you lost me. I've read this a bunch of times and I still don't understand. What does "legacy use of the emoji" have to do with anything?
Why did they not simply add a new symbol for "pregnant person" and allow modifiers for "male" and "female", as (I think, if I'm reading everything else correctly) is the usual course of action? Then they would presumably deprecate use of the old emoji, without ever removing it. To make this clear, you might explain in detail how they handled other initially gendered emoji like the "turban" or "bunny ears" cases mentioned in the ESC comments.
There is nothing logical about a pregnant man. Nice attempt to write thousands of words to legitimize it, but a pregnant man emoji is as useful as a emoji of a fish riding a bicycle. Both are pure fantasy.
That's a great argument! I'm sure you protested against the unicorn symbol as well!
To ensure the integrity of existing gendered emoji and to preserve a long runway for future additions, "person" based emoji should never be encoded with a sex symbol. As such, the "person" and "man" variants' are in the process of being added as atomic characters
In other words, due to the legacy use of the emoji and the importance of gender in its meaning, coupled with no modifier for non-binary because it's supposed to be the default, we are instead getting two additional independent variants. "Pregnant Man" (U+1FAC3) and "Pregnant Person" (U+1FAC4) will live alongside the original "Pregnant Woman" (U+1F930), breaking with convention.
This is where you lost me. I've read this a bunch of times and I still don't understand. What does "legacy use of the emoji" have to do with anything?
Why did they not simply add a new symbol for "pregnant person" and allow modifiers for "male" and "female", as (I think, if I'm reading everything else correctly) is the usual course of action? Then they would presumably deprecate use of the old emoji, without ever removing it. To make this clear, you might explain in detail how they handled other initially gendered emoji like the "turban" or "bunny ears" cases mentioned in the ESC comments.
First off, thanks for actually taking the time to read. My big fear is I accidentally whiffed something technical while I was writing this up at 3AM 😬
As per the last bit, I think the two things are connected. Maybe I can think of how to re-phrase it. "legacy use of the emoji" here is referring to backwards comparability. The standard action is not to create a new base emoji and deprecate the old one, but to replace the old one and then create the modifiers on top.
What you are suggesting would certainly be possible, but (from what I can tell) would be a further deviation from the norm. The other caveat to keep in mind is that they themselves do not unanimously consider 'pregnant man' and 'pregnant person' to be the same thing as 'pregnant woman.' So even if they did address it in that fashion (and this is speculation) I'm not sure it would satisfy everyone in the working group.
Yeah I don’t know if there is outrage per se. More like mockery. It’s just dumb. I did find the technical explanation interesting. That said, the implication seems to be (or maybe I’m inferring) that no matter how it was technically accomplished, it wasn’t done deliberately or pushed by any individual/group. I have a hard time believing that. I’m not saying it’s Apple, and I’m not saying I have any evidence to support it being deliberate. I certainly don’t think it should be ruled out, especially given where we are in the culture with respect to gender.
To ensure the integrity of existing gendered emoji and to preserve a long runway for future additions, "person" based emoji should never be encoded with a sex symbol. As such, the "person" and "man" variants' are in the process of being added as atomic characters
In other words, due to the legacy use of the emoji and the importance of gender in its meaning, coupled with no modifier for non-binary because it's supposed to be the default, we are instead getting two additional independent variants. "Pregnant Man" (U+1FAC3) and "Pregnant Person" (U+1FAC4) will live alongside the original "Pregnant Woman" (U+1F930), breaking with convention.
This is where you lost me. I've read this a bunch of times and I still don't understand. What does "legacy use of the emoji" have to do with anything?
Why did they not simply add a new symbol for "pregnant person" and allow modifiers for "male" and "female", as (I think, if I'm reading everything else correctly) is the usual course of action? Then they would presumably deprecate use of the old emoji, without ever removing it. To make this clear, you might explain in detail how they handled other initially gendered emoji like the "turban" or "bunny ears" cases mentioned in the ESC comments.
First off, thanks for actually taking the time to read. My big fear is I accidentally whiffed something technical while I was writing this up at 3AM ߘ즬t;br> As per the last bit, I think the two things are connected. Maybe I can think of how to re-phrase it. "legacy use of the emoji" here is referring to backwards comparability. The standard action is not to create a new base emoji and deprecate the old one, but to replace the old one and then create the modifiers on top.
What you are suggesting would certainly be possible, but (from what I can tell) would be a further deviation from the norm. The other caveat to keep in mind is that they themselves do not unanimously consider 'pregnant man' and 'pregnant person' to be the same thing as 'pregnant woman.' So even if they did address it in that fashion (and this is speculation) I'm not sure it would satisfy everyone in the working group.
Sure, and thank you for responding. I totally get that fear. :-)
I see the second political point.
But I don't understand the difference between "create a new base emoji and deprecate the old one" and "replace the old one and then create the modifiers on top". What does "replace" mean in this case? It's not like you can run "sed /pregnant woman/pregnant person+female modifier/" on every document on every storage system in the world from your master control center in World Domination HQ. :-) So what does "replace" really mean?
And if you're really just adding two more symbols (male/ungendered), why is there any need to mess with the original gendered symbol at all? Add the two, then you get the usual triplet. It's apparently not the case that all three are a contiguous run in the name space anyway.
[Edit: Jeez, what the heck did AI's comment system do to your smiley when I quoted you?? It broke the HTML.]
On a forward-looking note... I think most people fail to recognize just where the technology curve is taking us, and how fast it's moving, *and* how fast it's accelerating.
If you are bothered by people who ID as male getting pregnant, just wait until significant body mods move from science fiction to reality. It's coming, and it's going to be here in most of our lifetimes... unless the right-wing luddites crash our entire society, anyway. (Yes, there are lots of left-wing luddites too, and they're generally morons, but most of them are less inclined to violence.)
It may not happen for 20 or 30 years, maybe a little more, but I guarantee, someday you'll see a news article about some male-from-birth celebrity becoming pregnant. They'll stay male, but they'll have an embryo-support system (be it an actual biological womb, or something else) installed for the duration of the pregnancy. There will be outrage, and despair, and then 20 years after that nobody will care.
I think "Pregnant Man" could be used even by heterosexual males, as a whimsical way to say, "We are pregnant". In any case, most roles in society are now non-gendered, and so making this the general rule for composing elements to form emoji is fine. There really are no roles that are absolutely gendered in a purely cosmetic way.
There is nothing logical about a pregnant man. Nice attempt to write thousands of words to legitimize it, but a pregnant man emoji is as useful as a emoji of a fish riding a bicycle. Both are pure fantasy.
There are people who look like men and they're pregnant. They're not males, of course but they're perceived as men.
And there are plenty of emojis that are "illogical" too.
There are also fat men who look pregnant. What’s the big deal? Use it or not. Expand your tiny little world and get upset about something worthwhile.
Imma gonna guess that by Monday Tucker Carlson will need a break from a long weekend of stroking it to anamorphic candy characters and will find time to rile up his flock of marks over this.
There is nothing logical about a pregnant man. Nice attempt to write thousands of words to legitimize it, but a pregnant man emoji is as useful as a emoji of a fish riding a bicycle. Both are pure fantasy.
Thomas Jefferson speaks (paraphrased), you listen:
”It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are two genders or twenty genders. It neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket.”
It probably should be called “pregnant woman dressed as a man” (which is effectively male misappropriation) as we all know that it is scientifically impossible for a male to become pregnant.
It probably should be called “pregnant woman dressed as a man” (which is effectively male misappropriation) as we all know that it is scientifically impossible for a male to become pregnant.
It’s also scientifically impossible for a poop to have eyes and smile at you.
It probably should be called “pregnant woman dressed as a man” (which is effectively male misappropriation) as we all know that it is scientifically impossible for a male to become pregnant.
This is a perfect demonstration of the fact that many arguments like this are really, at least in part, about semantics.
Your statement is true, if and only if you (and those who agree with you) are the sole arbiter of the meaning of the word "male". However in the real world, there is obvious disagreement. You have a very narrow view based mostly on genetics (but not entirely, as there are rare people born as "obviously female" who have XY genes). Many others - possibly a majority, possibly not, but in any case a very large number - have a different definition. By theirs, it is entirely possible (though still quite rare) for males to be pregnant. Since there's no final arbiter, disputes continue.
This is identical to the argument about gay marriage. Many of those who opposed it claimed that it imposed upon their religion by damaging religious marriage. This failed to account for the fact that one word, "marriage", signified at least two concepts - a religious one and a completely secular one that encompassed legal rights and obligations. Laws enabling gay marriage had only secular consequences, but this was generally ignored in the debate.
In both of these instances, conservatives seemed quite incensed at the notion that the definition of the word can be other than they imagine. Among other things they want to force on everyone else, they want to be the arbiters of semantics. But sadly for them, they are not. Languages evolve, generally in rough accord with relevant social customs. And so we see that today, gay marriage is becoming widely accepted. The next generation may be only dimly aware that it was ever a political issue.
Comments
On a personal level, I agree with that statement. I tried to walk down the middle in the article in hopes that people wouldn't just bomb out halfway through. However, the reality is the emoji mostly exists due to simple beaucracy and adhearence to a system. At least that was the point I was getting at. It's 100% true there is a push within the ESC to be inclusive and representational and I think that should be lauded, but that inclusivity was baked into the system itself.
The 'pregnant man' and the 'pregnant person' emoji exist because they were just filling in the gaps in that system. No one sat down and said "we need to make this emoji to push a specific agenda or ideal." In fact, the original proposition was to not call them pregnant man/person, but that was rejected largely because of something as simple as naming convention.
I would have assumed that the impetus for this symbol is orthogonalization but the article really doesn't make that clear.
First off, thanks for actually taking the time to read. My big fear is I accidentally whiffed something technical while I was writing this up at 3AM 😬
As per the last bit, I think the two things are connected. Maybe I can think of how to re-phrase it. "legacy use of the emoji" here is referring to backwards comparability. The standard action is not to create a new base emoji and deprecate the old one, but to replace the old one and then create the modifiers on top.
What you are suggesting would certainly be possible, but (from what I can tell) would be a further deviation from the norm. The other caveat to keep in mind is that they themselves do not unanimously consider 'pregnant man' and 'pregnant person' to be the same thing as 'pregnant woman.' So even if they did address it in that fashion (and this is speculation) I'm not sure it would satisfy everyone in the working group.
”It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are two genders or twenty genders. It neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket.”