🏳️‍⚧️ Transgender Flag emoji

The Transgender Flag emoji 🏳️‍⚧️ was added to Emoji 13.0 in 2020. The emoji is a combination of the White Flag emoji 🏳️ and the Transgender Symbol emoji ⚧️. On most major platforms, the emoji depicts the transgender flag, composed of blue, pink, and white stripes, waving in the wind. The Twitter version of the emoji resembles the flag in the form of a rectangle with rounded corners. As of March 2021, the Transgender Flag emoji 🏳️‍⚧️ is not yet supported on Microsoft devices and will instead appear as a box followed by the Transgender Symbol emoji ⚧️. 

Before it was eventually approved in 2020, people had been campaigning for  a transgender flag emoji for years. As early as 2016, Google creative director Tea Uglow had submitted a proposal for a transgender flag emoji to the Unicode Consortium. The proposal was denied. For the next several years, activists would launch campaigns to drive support for a transgender flag emoji. These campaigns would gather widespread support and would eventually lead to a Unicode proposal for a transgender flag emoji submitted in 2019 that was backed by representatives from Google and Microsoft.   

Prior to the addition of the Transgender Flag emoji 🏳️‍⚧️, transgender activists began to use the Lobster emoji 🦞 in 2018 to represent transgender pride and support for a transgender flag emoji. This usage of the Lobster emoji 🦞 was due to the activism of the group Lobsters Against Transphobia. 

In a petition directed toward the Unicode Consortium, the group explained that they chose the lobster to express outrage of Unicode seemingly prioritizing crustaceans over transgender people in their decisions of which emoji to approve: “Unicode granted the Lobster emoji proposal, which argued that people suffered ‘frustration and confusion’ at having to use a shrimp or crab emoji instead of a lobster. Imagine if that was your gender. Surely we deserve the same rights you have afforded crustaceans?”

The group ended the petition with “Lobsters can actually be gynandromorphs (an organism that contains both male and female characteristics). So we’re going to take it as our symbol, until we get the Trans emoji we deserve.”