Gender Neutral and Specific Animals

[Crissov]

https://github.com/Ranks/emojione-assets/issues/3 https://github.com/Ranks/emojione/issues/325 https://github.com/twitter/twemoji/issues/164

Some dimorphous animals are shown with male or female attributes in Emojione although the character name or the Unicode specification say nothing about their sex. It would be nice if Emojione’s default illustration could be as generic as possible and explicit ZWJ sequences with U+2640 ♀️ and U+2642 ♂️ would be supported, even though they have not yet been recognized by Unicode.

🐂 U+1F402 Ox/Bull vs. 🐄 U+1F404 Cow

Unlike other emoji sets, the Cow has a visible udder here. That probably makes the Ox the more generic picture. (Note that the Aurox and Goat don’t show an udder.) There‘s no generic Cattle emoji, as far as I know.

🐏 U+1F40F Ram vs. 🐑 U+1F411 Sheep/Ewe

The Sheep has probably the more generic image, but there’s no explicitly female one.

🐓 U+1F413 Rooster/Cockerel vs. 🐔 U+1F414 Chicken/Hen

It’s a generic Chicken – Apple shows a chicken head – but often also thought of as hen, which could be shown with chick, egg or nest.

🐗 U+1F417 Boar

For most pigs and boars, only males have large, visible tusks. Although Apple does the same, it should probably be shown with body, too.

🦁 U+1F981 Lion Head

A lioness usually doesn’t have a mane, but it’s an iconic difference to other large cats.

🦃 U+1F983 Turkey

Sure, the male wild turkey is more iconic and colorful than the female one, but they both exist.

🦆 U+1F986 Duck

Maybe there are species of ducks where it’s not only the drakes who have a green head, but they do for the most common variant. I think the original proposal used a yellow rubber Duck.

🦌 U+1F98C Deer

Except for reindeers, female deers do not have antlers.

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We could support ZWJ sequences with ♀ U+2640 Female Sign and ♂ U+2642 Male Sign to choose a specific sex for animal emojis. Unicode does not document these yet, but it’s a straight-forward extension from human emojis, and if font vendors implemented them they’d be added in the future. It’s very unlikely that Unicode will encode any further specific sex distinctions as single code-points.

There are also proposals for explicitly gender-neutral human emoji sequences, but it’s not yet decided whether they will use ☿ U+263F Mercury, ♁ U+2641 Earth, ⚲ U+26B2 Neuter, ⚥ U+26A5 Male and Female Sign, ⚧ U+26A7 Male with Stroke and Male and Female Sign, ⚬ U+26AC Medium Small White Circle or something else.

For some animals, it would also make sense to be able to select a specific age variant, because young ones look significantly different from grown ones. There’s no precedent sequence for that, though.

[Crissov]

Duck and Deer already have female variants, but the default is still male and not neutral.

[ghost]

We also need Intersex animals. :smile: Theres documented cases of maned lioness.

[Crissov]

Lion and Boar have female variants in the gendered-animals branch. The default differs from the specific male glyph, but is not neutral either. Emojione 2.2 had a face-only boar.

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[spixi]

The winter plumage is the same for male and female mallards. Only in the mating season the drake has blue head feathers. The winter plumage should be used as the gender-neutral form.