Google unveils ‘third gender’ emoji coming to Android this year

[The AchieVer]

Google unveils ‘third gender’ emoji coming to Android this year

 

 

Google has revealed dozens of “third gender” emoji coming to Android smartphones later this year.

 

The new gender-inclusive emoji include police officers, superheroes, wizards, wrestlers and even zombies.

 

Emoji are decided by the Unicode Consortium, which is made up of tech firms like Google, Microsoft, Apple and the internet’s main emoji hub Emojipedia.

New emoji are added all the time, and dozens of new designs have now been revealed in a new paper published by Google.

 

“Gender has many exceptions and implantation details, and many aspects of this have been discussed in past documents,” said Google’s Jennifer Daniel.

“This document is to note Google’s intent to use gender-inclusive designs where code points exist and to signal Google’s interest in additional gender sequences.”

 

 

Loads of emoji are getting a new “third gender” option — including zombies.Source:Supplied

Apple, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung all offer some “gender-inclusive” emoji already.

But — as Google points out — not all human emoji have gender-neutral options.

 

So Google has taken to adding “third gender” designs to a large number of existing emoji.

 

“Each emoji that already has specific options for women or men will be unaffected by this change,” Emojipedia explained.

 

“Gender isn’t going away, it’s getting a third option.”

 

Some users have called for Google to return to its previous “genderless, skin-tone-less blobs”, which were a fan favourite.

 

The “blobs” were largely gender-neutral, which meant that they didn’t cause offence.

 

One Twitter user reacted to the news by writing: “Adding a third gender to emoji is fine I guess. But blob emotes had no gender and that was beautiful.”

 

However, the blobs could also be slightly insulting: “As an aside, at the time the blobs existed on Android, the feedback sent to Google was often not supportive of the choice,” Emojipedia reveals.

 

“People sent a woman in a red dress from iOS or Twitter weren’t necessarily pleased at the blob with a rose in its mouth that arrived on Android devices.”

 

The new gender-neutral emoji will be “coming to Android this year” according to Emojipedia, but there’s no firm release date.

 

It’s possible that other tech firms will also borrow these emoji.

 

 

 

 

 

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