Google New Gender Ambiguous Emoji: The Google chief emoji director Jennifer Daniel outlined on Tuesday that 53 gender ambiguous emoji are coming to Android users; later this week, the new icons will be launched as part of a beta test for Pixel users — they will roll out devices powered by Android Q later this year. “We’re not calling this the non-binary character, the third gender, or an asexual emoji — and not gender neutral. Gender neutral is what you call pants,” Daniel stated.
Not only will the selection of human faces be expanded to be more inclusive, but also all humanoid icons like zombies, merpeople, and weightlifters will have a gender-ambiguous option.
Daniel, who is a member of the organization that sets core emoji standards Unicode consortium, stated that 64 of the emoji in the library were designed to be gender ambiguous, but Google, Apple, and Samsung designed their own iterations to signify genders.
As tech companies all design their emojis based on Unicode consortium’s collection, we can expect to see Apple, Facebook, and Samsung follow in Google’s footsteps and launch their own iteration of these gender fluid emoji.
Google’s new approach to gender fluid emojis is in line with this year’s Emoji 12.0 which has major representation for gender-neutral characters, and disabled people. Emoji 12.0 comes with gender fluid emojis for deaf people, the person standing, kneeling, holding hands and more. It also comes with the gender-neutral couple holding hands.
