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Apple’s Gender-Neutral Emojis Aren’t for Everyone
They place restrictions and limits on an identity that’s all about freedom
On Monday, Apple released a new version of iOS — and with it, a hotly anticipated update to its emoji collection. Where once users had been limited to just male and female versions of popular emojis like elf, zombie, graduate, detective, and British police officer, now a third, gender-neutral option is available. In the same way that the addition of multiple racial options made it possible for a wider range of users to see themselves reflected in their emojis, the new gender-neutral emojis aim to provide those who don’t align with the traditional gender binary — whether they identify as gender nonconforming, nonbinary, or something else entirely — a chance to feel more accurately represented in their texts.
For some users, these new emojis are a breath of fresh air. Prior to the update, “I usually just picked a binary gender emoji at random when I used them at all,” says Karasu, a nonbinary person who contacted me over Twitter to share their thoughts about the new emoji set. Now, with the new option, their identity feels a little more visible. “It’s always nice to be seen,” they tell me.
But these new, “neutral” emojis still aren’t exactly representative. Like all emojis, the gender-neutral emoji set is forced to represent a diverse and complicated world in just one tiny picture. But unlike, say, a cup of tea or an avocado, nonbinary and gender nonconforming people have an emotional stake in how those emojis represent them — and the choices that Apple’s designers made ultimately reinforce some harmful ideas about what it means to be “gender-neutral” that can leave many people feeling erased and ignored even as their identity is supposedly made more visible.
Apple’s interpretation of gender-neutral tries to strike a balance between male and female features. While the female emojis have round heads and male ones lean towards a squarer shape, their gender-neutral counterparts are…
