The New Bottle-Feeding Emoji Set the Perfect Example of How to Be Inclusive of Every Family
We depend a lot on emoji. Those little faces, hands, and symbols help us to get our thoughts across and connect to other people. The Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit that helps ensure our modern hieroglyphics are available, has done a good bit of work over the years to make its lists more inclusive—adding skin color variations, hijab, and other cultural variations—added a breastfeeding emoji back in 2017, but they've taken the inclusivity one step further with the latest update.
🆕✨ Unicode Emoji 13.0 — Now final for 2020 ✨🆕
First we got bear 🐻, panda 🐼, and koala 🐨. And now, polar bear! Unicode Emoji 13.0 introduces 62 new #emoji, plus 55 skintone and gender variants. We can barely wait! https://t.co/EwnwJJT4hW pic.twitter.com/P70mbUSSzM— The Unicode Consortium (@unicode) January 29, 2020
RELATED: Give Bottlefeeding Moms a Break
Emoji 13.0 will include gender-inclusive baby-feeding emoji. Previously, for those who bottle-fed, there was only a lone baby bottle emoji, which lacks much in capturing the bonding that takes place between caregivers and baby during bottle feeding. The new update includes several variants of bottle-feeding by introducing a nonbinary person and a man, in addition to a woman bottle-feeding.
Going farther, there's even a chest-feeding emoji to represent trans and nonbinary parents. All genders feed babies! It's not just a mom task. It's a mom and dad task, or a mom and mommy task, or a dad and daddy task. Changes, even small changes like a chest-feeding emoji or a man with a bottle, are huge leaps away from the gender stereotypes that have plagued us. Not all families are made up of a mom and a dad. Thank you to the Unicode Consortium for taking a step in normalizing all families!
