🫄Also a pregnant person option.
As a trans guy that does want to carry my own someday, it’s kinda cute and the fact that people see it on their keypad will probably make my life easier when I get to that point.
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Normalisation absolutely helps, yes. All the monstrous GOP rhetoric hinges on othering trans folks. An emoji is a tiny step, but every little helps. Unironically thank you for asking, that was actually an excellent and important question.
I don’t think that someone who dislikes trans people is going to see it and immediately start flying an ally flag. I do think it can have an impact.
It helps young trans men and their sexual partners - it is sadly common for folks to assume that they can’t get pregnant on testosterone. It often stops cycles, so it does decrease the chances, but it is important for trans men and anyone they might be having sex with recognize that pregnancy is a possibility if they’re using their original plumbing. If you aren’t having cycles, it’s easier to miss one. Never happened to me or anyone I know, but I transitioned a while back and my doctor didn’t know this. (I also had to tell the doctor I was straight to get treatment back in the day, so maybe it’s fair he didn’t warn me 😂) Pregnancy requires going off of testosterone though, as it can harm the fetus.
It helps educate the Irreversible Damage crowd - the narrative of mutilation and destruction. TERFs tend to bemoan fertility - this idea that evil rainbow people are going to trick your kids into giving up the ability to have children. This is the kind of narrative everyone’s favorite children’s book author pushes - “your poor daughters will transition to escape male privilege and regret giving up their ability to have babies!” But this is something that you discuss with your doctors as part of your treatment. When I used Planned Parenthood to get my testosterone, I also got lots of guidance and advice on my long term fertility.
I also frequently have to explain to nurses and doctors the configuration of my anatomy. There are lots of people, even educated medical professionals, who have make a ton of assumptions about how trans medical care works. A common assumption might be that all trans men find the idea of childbirth so upsetting that it’s best not to bring it up at all (this may be the experience for some folks, but not for all). When I’ve experienced new patient intake, sometimes doctors will ask me when I’m “completing” my transition - which they understand as a hysterectomy. Awareness of the fact that transgender men want to and do carry children might help them understand that transition often has different end goals for different folks.
It might also help my future children when I explain to them the story of how they came into the world. When I work with children now, it’s very important to me that they see themselves and their families represented, and that would be even more critical for my own children.
I'm going to be 100. I'm all for trans rights, but when I saw a man pregnant emoji trans men didn't even cross my mind. I really don't know what effect the emoji will have on the path to normalization.
Ah yeah, the Unicode Consortium ran into an issue a while back where they realized their emoji descriptors weren’t specific enough and were leading to confusion in cross-platform conversations. Apple used to have a woman in a red dress for “Dancer”, while most Android distributions showed a man in a disco suit. They started getting more specific in their emoji definitions and in 2016 and introduced a few emoji pairs like “Woman Dancing” and “Man Dancing” to clear up the existing confusion.
By 2019 the emoji concepts which were gendered (dancing, etc.) and non-gendered (skiing, surfing, etc.) had become pretty arbitrary. They decided to standardize offering a male, female, and generic version of every human emoji. It’s, you know, a standard, so they generally don’t make that many exceptions. Even emoji like “Santa Claus” have a female “Mrs. Claus” and a generic “Claus” options.
Plus some trans men can still get pregnant so it's not like it's that ludicrous an inclusion.
Hell yeah. 🙌
To expand on that, the way they decided to implement emoji in a simple, flexible and extendable way, was to combine emoji codes.
You have the code for pregnant person and combine it with the code for the male or female symbol emoji, to make the pregnant man or women emoji. So in a way, it's easier to support all variations than only some.
So in a way, it's easier to support all variations than only some.
Words to live by really
They also did the same regarding race. Used to be that person emojis were always non-descript in that regard. Most implementations used Simpsons-yellow skin, and Android used a green, non-humanoid character.
Nowadays, the more recent human emojis tend to have a bunch of realistic skin tone options as well as Simpsons-yellow default, but they haven't gone back and made those options for many of the older emojis.
Wait until you see the pregnant woman emoji
holy shit
Big if true.
In Czechia, we call it average Czech man older than 40 years
I use it for “damn I just ate a ton of tacos” 🫃🌮
That's specifically for when you need to mention the 1994 Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger cult classic comedy Junior.
M preg
Its for after turkey day conversations.
Yes, it's been there for a while
Not all pregnant people have long hair, what a surprise
No, it’s not the generic “pregnant person” emoji, it’s explicitly a “pregnant man” emoji. It’s technically a “man emoji” a “pregnant emoji” and a combining mark. That’s what allows the skin colors and flags to work as well.
Ya ya, we’ve all seen Junior.
That's strange. I went to use it on my android phone and only the woman appeared. But in the sync app, there are 3 options. And if I copy/paste the pregnant man emoji from sync to messages, it works fine. So that means the code is there for Android, but they intentionally hide it? I wonder why. Maybe they think it's too weird?
On my pixel phone the other versions are hidden under long press.
Well, to implement the emoji standard, they have to have something there. If they left it blank it would look messy if someone ever used it.
But yeah, Gboard doesn't let you use all emojis.
Can't find it on MS Swift as well, which is weird 🤔
Huh. It's not even a composition. That's wild.
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