Inside the Hyperspecific Quest to Add a Transgender Emoji
Small characters carry massive meaning, particularly for underrepresented communities
By Meg Miller
Three-quarters of the way down the 2019 Unicode Document Registry, somewhere below a proposal for the Iranian symbol Faravahar (فروهر ) and just above proposals for an accordion emoji and a cockroach emoji, is L2/19–080: the Proposal for Transgender Flag Emoji. Submitted on March 14, 2019, the proposal source is coded “Ted Eytan et al,” shorthand for a team that includes a physician and several well-known transgender activists, as well as designers and software engineers from Google and Microsoft. It’s the result of nearly two years of writing and revising, building out a team of experts, shoring up support, and harnessing the energy of Tweet storms and Pride Parades into a very precisely formatted, data-heavy document.
It’s not the first time the proposal has been submitted — this particular document has gone through two previous iterations, and several members of the current team submitted their own proposals before joining forces. But it is the most thorough and strongly argued version thus far, with everything from a section on “image distinctiveness” to Google trend charts that show a significant increase in searches for “transgender,”…
