Proposal To Add Pride Flags 🏳️‍🌈

[felifluid]

Heyey! i recently found out about the OpenMoji project and am using it for my digital garden. for this i designed several common pride flags. i have currently uploaded the files to a seperate repository. i want to suggest including them in this repository as well.

i am aware that in #475 @b-g stated that OpenMoji will no longer accept any flags without unicode definition.

We changed a while our contribution guidelines and no longer are accepting any flags without an official unicode definition. Sorry! But arguing e.g. to include a flag like Kurdistan or not is too tough. We resignated at some point as we simply couldn't moderate it. Hence we won't be able to include those (even if I may add, personally I would too). I hope you understand.

However, the Unicode Consortium will no longer accept any proposals for flag emojis. This is especially highlighted for pride flags.

Despite being the largest emoji category with a strong association tied to identity, flags are by far the least used. (There are exceptions: usage of the rainbow flag is above median!) That begs the question, “So, why not encode more identity flags?” Well, we have seen the same results for flags as we have seen for other emoji — a very long tail of rarely used options. They also tend to change over time! In the past six years since adding a Pride Flag to the Unicode Standard (2019) it’s already been redesigned. Many times. Identities are fluid and unstoppable which makes mapping them to a formal unchanging universal character set incompatible.

therefore it is highly unlikely that more pride flags will be added to the official unicode definiton in the forseeable future.

soo... i think OpenMoji has a special opportunity at hand here. according to its code of contuct OpenMoji supports adding emojis that adress "social and critical issues e.g. Climate change" and it also includes this pledge:

We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community.

and i think adding pride flags would be highly in support of this pledge.

in fact: many fediverse and discord server already manually add different pride flag emojis to their servers (e.g. https://mutant.tech/). though this oftentimes involves manually adding the new emojis one by one. with OpenMoji this could be more easily done with fonts.

in addition, the reasoning that flags change over the years which would be too much effort to maintain doesn't really apply to the OpenMoji project. as it is open source, pride flags can be added or updated over the years. OpenMoji also doesn't aim to be a formal unchanging universal character definition as Unicode. OpenMoji also added a variety of company logos like Twitter or personalities like Trump or Greta Thunberg.

i would hope this will encourage some discussion about maybe lifting the block of adding new flags to OpenMoji.

[b-g]

Hi @felifluid many thanks for the proposal and nicely laid out arguments. We've discussed this internally and reached out to personal contacts of people who potentially could feel be represented with the stated flags. The discussions have been positive and helpful, but took some time (sorry for the slow response) ... and often were along these lines:

"This is a very sensitive topic with the flags and the mentions of all possible facets. Personally, I think it's too detailed, too specific. But to give a meaningful answer, I would perhaps argue that the transgender flag is currently of great political relevance and should therefore be included, along with the progressive pride flag to include everyone else."

"You can easily step into a hornet's nest here... what is identity? And what is preference? Transgender and gay/lesbian as opposed to polyamory and BDSM."

"I've never heard of aroace and demi."

... and so one.

It is really tricky, especially as it somehow is contradicting to our contribution guide lines.

Hence could we find a a compromise and add for now only the Progressive Pride? And in the next step find more good arguments e.g. why exactly the proposed set is good in terms of gender representation? Basically if we add the big set we should have some "proof" that this is a standard or widely used etc. We simply have to avoid endless debates, why then something again is missing.

I hope this makes sense. Please let me know whether this would be acceptable or what we have overlooked.

All the very best, Benedikt

[felifluid]

Hi! First, i wanna give a thanks to you and the OpenMoji team for looking into this. i was worried that this proposal was just gonna get dismissed.

i have reached out to some of my peers from the queer community to gather some thoughts on this topic. i will use we/us pronouns when conveying the collective character of an opinion.

we first want to lay out some of our thoughts on the last response you gave.

…along with the progressive pride flag to include everyone else.

While true that the progressive pride flag is be a symbol of the own queer identity (or as a sign of support for the queer community), it lacks specificity. The progressive pride flag fails at expressing the own specific gender identity or sexuality. It feels a bit like saying

• "The world map emoji 🗺️ includes all countries, therefore we don't need country flags 🇩🇪🇵🇸🇺🇦."
• "The family emoji 👪 includes all family constellations, therefore we don't need additional emojis for diverse family constellations 👩‍👧👨‍👨‍👧‍👦👨‍👩‍👧👨‍👦‍👦"

What is identity? And what is preference?

This question can get very philosophical very quickly. But we are struggling to see why/how this question should be relevant to the proposal. Emojis (especially in bios on social media) are oftentimes used to express a preference. Examples of this include:

• "🎻🐱" could express a preference for playing the violin and cats.
• "🚲🥦" could express a preference for cycling and weed.

Pride flags like the bdsm flag could similarly express a preference for kink.

The transgender flag is currently of great political relevance and should therefore be included.

This implies that great political relevance is a (main) criteria for the addition of new (flag) emojis. This opens two questions:

1. Who/What defines political relevance?
2. What happens when an emoji loses it's political relevance after being added?

I've never heard of xy.

We believe that the personal lack of knowledge about the existence of something should not be a criteria for the addition of new emojis. This argumentation would enable denying the addition of anything related to social, ethnic or political minorities. Asking for opinions within the own personal social bubble can give a very limited perspective. We think it's very important to gather some insights from queer organizations and clubs like Bundesverband Trans*, LSVD+, dgti or Queer Lexikon.

We simply have to avoid endless debates, why then something again is missing.

It is likely that the adoption of this proposal will motivate additional proposals regarding pride flags. But we are currently struggling to see what exactly is the worry with that. What are the arguments against liberal, open acceptance guidelines for new pride flags to OpenMoji?

We should have some "proof" that this is a standard or widely used etc.

As most pride flags are currently not a Unicode standard it's basically impossible to find any statistics of the use of pride flag emojis. We can take a rough estimate on their relevance if we take a look at some online communities that have implemented some pride flag emojis on their own. Examples of this include:

• tech.lgbt (2.6k active users)
• transfem.social (2.3k users)
• chaos.social (6k active users)
• eldritch.cafe (1k active users)
• Spectrum discord server (31k users)
• Mt. Celeste Climbing Association (24k users)

---

While we do think that adding the progress pride flag would be an appreciated and easy start, we are hoping that the approval of additional pride flags and a change of the flag policy will be (re-)considered.

We are hoping to get some more thoughts and opinions on this topic. Especially for some insights from queer organizations and social media server admins. We think that additionally and parallel to the OpenMoji project this discussion should also take place regarding the Unicode standard. However, we believe that the OpenMoji project has an easier position because it is not bound to the Unicode standards.

Thanks again for your considerations and efforts regarding this proposal.

All the best, Feli 💜

[RealityRipple]

I'm not Muslim personally, but to me this feature request looks like an attempt to spit in the Islam's face (Islam is clearly against LGBT). Are you sure this change is really "We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community" and won't add more hatred instead? You should really consult Islamic groups first before accepting this.

That's an inclusive disjunct affirmation. A logical fallacy that, in this context, claims inclusion of one group must exclude another.
Inclusion in this context means representation of all groups, without any one group being able to dictate terms for or censure their own or other groups.

[CherryKitten]

I'm not Muslim personally, but to me this feature request looks like an attempt to spit in the Islam's face (Islam is clearly against LGBT). Are you sure this change is really "We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community" and won't add more hatred instead? You should really consult Islamic groups first before accepting this.

Since you say that you're not muslim yourself, this just sounds like a racist attempt to create friction between people you have nothing to do with.

Islam is not generally anti-LGBT, so the claim that inclusion of Pride flags would be an attack on muslims is just plain wrong and not based in any reality.

[aylen384]

I'm not Muslim personally, but to me this feature request looks like an attempt to spit in the Islam's face (Islam is clearly against LGBT). Are you sure this change is really "We pledge to act and interact in ways that contribute to an open, welcoming, diverse, inclusive, and healthy community" and won't add more hatred instead? You should really consult Islamic groups first before accepting this.

This unacceptable comment really shows why this should be accepted. There is still much hate around - including but not limited to from people who use their religion as an excuse for their hate.

[LuNeder]

Having these on openmoji would be lovely!

[yellowJennifer]

this is a MUST for openmoji! please consider this further!

[OriCat101]

having this would be amazing

[b-g]

After speaking again with my peers, the other maintainers, and giving it a long thought, I would like to propose the following:

We reframe the discussion by avoiding the word "flag" altogether, as in my opinion the proposed new emojis are not flags in the sense of territory, but rather symbols of identity. The existing transgender emoji would also be moved to a new category: extras-openmoji / gender-identity (happy to discuss the category name).

Furthermore (choices):

• Option A: Only the Progressive Pride emoji is added (the OpenMoji maintainers could take care of it)
• Option B: The full set is added. However, as the OpenMoji maintainers are not experts in this topic and don't follow the gender identity discourse closely, we would need help to maintain and moderate this in the future. Basically, adding the full set would come with a commitment from @felifluid to maintain the set and moderate related discussions in the coming years.

PS: @felifluid, many thanks for writing this up and providing arguments and references.

PS2: OpenMoji does not exist in a social vacuum. The maintainers are based in Germany and consider same-sex marriage, for example, to be a societal achievement protected by law. As OpenMoji is a resource that you can choose to use or not, I personally don't feel responsible if other countries operate under different laws. Also, in comparison to other emoji sets that are tightly bundled with hardware or operating systems, you have a choice with OpenMoji.

[felifluid]

Hi Benedikt!

Thanks again for your efforts in bringing this forward to your peers and the other maintainers. The queer community often struggles to get proper consideration and recognition, so this feels like a nice wind of change.

This proposal has grown very close to my heart. So I would gladly accept the offer to become maintainer/moderator for the pride symbols at the OpenMoji project and the commitment that comes with it for the coming years 💜
Feel free to reach out to me via mail to discuss further details (:

As for the category name:
The flags include queer symbols of both sexual, romantic and gender diversity, so "gender-identity" doesn't quiet grasp it.
I think "pride flags" would be the most commonly known term for these queer symbols (as also listed in Wikipedia). Alternatively, I suggest the term/category "queer-symbols" or "pride-symbols" – would be open for other suggestions as well.

PS: Thanks to everyone who engaged with this discussion – either with reactions, with comments or in other ways. Your support truly matters a lot to me and made me a very emotional and happy entity 💜

[b-g]

@felifluid Great!! Many thanks 🙏

As for the category name:
The flags include queer symbols of both sexual, romantic and gender diversity, so "gender-identity" doesn't quiet grasp it.
I think "pride flags" would be the most commonly known term for these queer symbols (as also listed in Wikipedia). Alternatively, I suggest the term/category "queer-symbols" or "pride-symbols" – would be open for other suggestions as well.

Ok. I'm really not so keen on anything with "flag", for the many reasons we have discussed above. I would vote for queer-symbols. However in https://github.com/hfg-gmuend/openmoji/blob/master/data/extras-openmoji.csv you could add all the keywords e.g. "pride flags" in the "openmoji_tags" column, so that people are able to find the new queer-symbols with the most common terminology via the fuzzy search on the website.

Could you also coordinate / moderate #587?

PS. If you have any questions happy to get a DM. You can find my email on openmoji.org/about