[jandrese]

Maybe ability to turn skin color brown? Or maybe the poster is mad that some country flag was or wasn't included? The only other distant possibility is how some character sets turn the gun emoji into a water pistol, but that's not on the Unicode consortium. I can't think of anything else that is political in the set.

[Y_Y]

I dont want to supply munitions to the culture war, but I would like to add a counterpoint.

Adding skin tone modifiers to emojis was a bit odd to me, since I view them as signifying emotions rather than people. Maybe that's why, of the six Fitzpatrick scale[0] skin tones they drew from, the only one not added was mine.

Similarly odd to me (to the point of appearing performative) was having a male/female/ambiguous variant on every job emoji and a separate option for every two-child two-parent family "gender" permutation. That's not how I view language as working, particularly because you're not going to be able to cover all valid families that way. It makes more sense to me, if communication rather than tokenism is the goal, to have a couple of representative emojis that convey the general concept, and then specify whatever you want about the relevant people afterward.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale

[jonlong]

> you're not going to be able to cover all valid families that way

In fact the emoji committee backpedaled on family permutations for exactly this reason, and now recommends (exactly as you suggest) "symbolic" family glyphs and juxtaposition of existing people-emoji to describe families in detail.

You can read about it here: https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2022/22276-family-emoji-guidelin...

[jandrese]

Even the new proposal still has problems. It still has all of the variations between 1 and 2 parents and 1 and 2 children. IMHO it should all be collapsed down to just two Emoji:

1. Two people without children

2. Two people with children.

The former being short for "just the parents" or childless couples and the latter encompassing all families with kids regardless of the numbers. This is a compromise answer, but I think it serves the purpose best given the intended use of emojis.

And even better solution would be to figure out some iconography that would denote "family" without explicitly depicting the people, but I'm at a loss on that one. I mean the people are what families are all about, it's hard to divorce the concept.