Endless Thread - The internet's fight over dinosaur emoji

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

Emoji might not be 66 million years old, but they are pretty much everywhere. Join Ben and Amory as they explore the history of dinosaur emoji in LGBTQ+ communities and their more recent use as an online dog-whistle for anti-trans activists. What happens when one symbol is used for conflicting reasons? And can the dinosaur emoji avoid redefinition — or extinction?

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Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. All right, so, Amory, can you read this an incredible piece of literature? We've got a telephone. A little dude making some kind of expression with his mouth open, but I can't really see what the eyes are doing. Got a sailboat, a little whale. Just for the record. I'm not asking you to literally repeat the emoji. Oh.

I'm asking you to read this because it is an incredible piece of literature. Well, the first line of it looks like Moby Dick. Hmm. How would you translate it? First line says, got a bad phone call. I got to get on a boat and go see about a whale. So this is, what you are looking at right now, Amory, is an excerpt of a translation, an emoji translation of the Herman Melville classic Moby Dick or The Whale.

And it's called emoji dick. This was admittedly made years ago, and the book was translated by people all over the world. And what's interesting here is that they actually translated some of the same words differently in emoji, like quikwag or the whale or the sea. And you know what this is like? So do you know the hot and sweaty red-faced emoji with its tongue out, Amory?

Yeah. What does that one mean to you? That to me is it's a hot day and you're cleaning out the garage and you're like, oh, this sucks. I'm so hot and I hate this so much. I'm pretty sure that's not how the kids use it. Oh, no.

I think the kids use that emoji as in like, this makes me horny. What? It's not the way we did it in my day, kids. So I want us to explore this specific thing that is happening with this specific set of emoji that's really become this heated debate involving who gets. to own the meaning of symbols, specifically the symbols that we all use to make meaning on our phones. And the specific emoji that I want to talk about today, Amory, not the eggplant emoji, not the hot and bothered emoji, or cleaning out your garage emoji. But I want to talk about the T-Rex and Brockiosaurus emoji.

I'm Amory Sewardson. I'm Ben Blockeosaurus Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. 2020, baby. And we're going to start with this one, the saga of those innocent little dinosaur emoji that ended up getting used for something not so innocent. And what the tug of war over the meaning of these dynos? The tiny armed green Tyrannosaurus and their goose-necked sidekick and prey,

the blue brociosaurus, or brontosaurus, or apatosaurus. what the meaning of these dynos tells us about how we use symbols. So to understand this dinosaur emoji story, we thought we should start with a little dinosaur knowledge. So Amory, join me on the get on the chopper to Isla Nublar. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do. Cue the music. When did you first become interested in dinosaurs?

Was it the Cretaceous or the... Or 38, so going backwards, that would be... This is Riley Black. I'm a science journalist and author. I've written books like skeleton keys in the last days of the dinosaurs. Riley loves her some dynos. Big and loud, for whatever reason, was my jam. Like when she was five and visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

her first encounter. At the time it was very dark and it was dim, very moody, and just seeing these skeletons that were so much bigger than I was, seeing them in that kind of ghostly light and thinking about

what did they look like? What did they sound like? What did they eat? I remember being very struck standing in the shadow of a brontosaurus skeleton thing. Like, what did it sound when it breathed?

That sound of just like life coming out of this animal out of these old bones. Now, she digs for fossils professionally. She writes about it, she tweets about it, online she exists in multiple worlds, and multiple dinosaur communities. A lot of it is very professionalized, people talking about their new papers and new studies coming out in their latest field expedition. There's also a broader community of dinosaur and paleontology enthusiasts, people who just like to know more, or they were inspired by Jurassic Park, and they want to find out the real stories behind these animals. And the number of paleo artists on social media right now is astounding.

Like when people talk about great. If you look through some of this paleo art, it is astounding. Yeah. Some of these things look real. Like there's a feathered synoseropterics. Yes. Which kind of looks like a lemur duck hybrid. And it almost looks like it was caught on camera.

But within this group of dinosaur artists and enthusiasts or overlapping with this group, There's another subset of people. Many people who are queer, whether they are trans or some other form of gender queer or whatever it is, we love dinosaurs. Along with being a dinosaur expert, Riley is herself transgender. And according to Riley, there is a whole community of genderqueer dinosaur enthusiasts online. We had no idea. So we checked it out. Sure enough, they're there.

We found dozens of paleo artists online that identify as queer. Type dinosaur into the LGBT subreddit, hundreds of results, with Pride Dinos, Rainbow Dinos, Dino-Moms, Dino-Moms, Dino-Dads, and a lot of puns. Like Allisaurus. Transceratops. In 2018, the Twitter account for Sue, the T-Rex, one of the world's most famous dinosaurs held at the Field Museum in Chicago, that account updated Sue's bio to include the dinosaur's pronouns.

They, them. What's the connection between people who I identify as gender, queer, and dinosaurs? I am not entirely sure why. This is an aspect of social psychology, I think, that has not been plummed as yet. Social psychologists, please get plumbing, because we're not sure why either. Dinosaurs have been around for a while, just like the LGBTQ community. And if you remember your elementary school science class or Jurassic Park, you'll recall that dinosaurs are all around, because birds are dinosaurs.

And Riley says that fact may be part of the draw for transgender people. And I think that aspect of falling into more than one category at once and some of these threads of sort of transformation through time are just naturally appealing to people like me and other people in the trans community. I bet you never look at birds the same way again. This community might not be gigantic, but it is strong and undeniably present. And along with art and expressions of pride, you will definitely see Dino emoji. Were you using the dinosaur emoji relatively frequently before all of this stuff happened?

Or what was your... Yeah, I mean, I would use dinosaur emojis for emphasis just to share things I was excited about, especially when paired with other emojis. Like, I have a book that's coming out in April about the extinction of the dinosaurs that occurred 66 million years ago. Whenever I'd talk about it, I'd use a little dinosaur. dinosaur emoji, a comet emoji, a plant emoji, and a raccoon emoji to kind of tell that story of, like, the dinosaurs going extinct implants and mammals coming back afterwards and just having fun, like, with storytelling. But a few months ago, Riley started to see dinosaur emoji that weren't so fun. I think my initial knee-jerk reaction was just like, well, you can't have them. Like, dinosaurs are ours.

The T-Rex and Blocchiosaurus were showing up in the profiles of a different online community. kind of as a badge, a dog whistle to say to others within that community, I'm one of you. It really just made zero sense to me whatsoever in terms of like, you know, they could have picked anything else and it might have made a little bit more sense to me. Riley refers to the group of co-opters as TERF, as in T-E-R-F, trans exclusionary radical feminists who call themselves, quote, gender-critical. In other words, anti-trans. Broadly speaking, TERFs promote the idea that trans women are really men,

that unlike cisgender women, trans women have benefited from being a part of the patriarchy and thus are a threat to cis women. Above all, they say that, unlike sex, gender identity is an ideology and is not grounded in science. We'll come back to this. You may recall the most famous or infamous person

associated with turf ideology is J.K. Rowling, the Harry Potter author. Among other things, in 2020, she published a 3,700-word essay defending her belief that the term woman as a political and biological class was being eroded by people who refer to trans women as women. Anyway, turfs using dinosaur emoji was a problem for Riley. To see, you know, our social enemies, for lack of a better term, taking these symbols in trying to use it as their dog whistle. It was something where it's just like, wait, where is this even coming from? This makes zero sense.

And also dinosaurs are ours. I hate to speak for the entire trans or gender queer community. But, like, no, we've already been wondering about them and drawing them and interested. No matter who you are, if you see something beloved taken over by someone else, that can be hard. Suddenly, gender queer fans of dinoes everywhere felt under attack as turfs kept dropping the emoji into their feeds. And we know how these things go. Just think of Pepe the Frog or the Punisher's skull or the swastika.

When outsider groups latch onto a symbol, that symbol is often changed irrevocably. But emoji Rex and brocciosaurus, it's more complicated because Riley and others refused to let go. More on that in 66 million microseconds. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more. than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music.

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Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. It's not clear if TURF's new. knew they were co-opting something beloved to this slice of the gender queer community. As far as we can tell, dinosaur emoji began showing up in anti-trans Twitter bios around October of last year. And the catalyst may have been the UK's Parliament, which reminds one of Muppets in more ways than one. Denied their rights in this country under her watch. Once enslaved, then conalized, and now repatriated.

When will Black, Black, Love? Lives matter once again. David Lammy is a liberal MP. He's also a shadow secretary. His job is to criticize the conservative government, to stir up controversy in a way. He's good at it. And back in September,

Lammy was asked in a meeting about transgender rights. So he responded, calling out his colleagues on the right and in his own party for being anti-trans. He called them dinosaurs, as in behind the times. This was not. big news, except on Twitter, where a little pocket of the internet was blowing up.

Turfs were offended by the analogy, and then they embraced it. Like one person who goes by the handle, Lily Lillie Maynard. She started tweeting videos of her fellow turfs outside the labor party's headquarters. They're dressed in cheap, inflatable dinosaur costumes, singing off-key about genitals, which we are not going to play for obvious reasons. But if you Google Labor Party head office. The main image representing the building is of these dinosaurs. It would be comical if it weren't in service of one group rejecting another's identity. I feel like the first time we really saw the double meaning of the emoji has to be the eggplant. There's one guy you have to call if you want to understand emoji. They felt like an odd choice to put on the emoji keyboard.

So people kind of immediately saw that and went, that's funny. That name. now means a penis. Say hello to Jeremy Burge. And I'm the founder and chief emoji officer at Emojipedia. What does that mean? That's a good question. What does it mean? Emojipedia describes every emoji, what it looks like, what it looks like on all platforms. And for me, I oversee a small team of people who do exactly that, describe how people use emojis and how they evolve over time. We asked Jeremy, how common is this? Emboji double meanings used like a badge. These days, we have plenty of alternative meanings. You do see Twitter bios people put an emoji up there as sort of an identity. You'll see the American flag is quite popular amongst generally conservative

Americans. There's a rose emoji which are fans of Bernie Sanders and sort of US-style democratic socialism in general. You'll see them put that in their Twitter bio. And then you get other really niche sort of ones in Australia that was a big water scandal and people started putting a water drop in their Twitter bio and I don't know, you find that maybe a more aggressive group of people start using it and then you can't use that in your bio anymore because you feel like

you'll be grouped in with people you don't want to be. Amory, did you know about all those? Ben, did I know about any of those? No. Well, I have news. Jeremy had like so many more examples and most of them are not surprisingly related to sex.

The ear of corn. It rhymes with porn. the bowl of noodles gets used for sending nudes. Some of this stuff is just silly, and sometimes it's about getting around censorship on platforms or apps like TikTok. But it can also be about things that are more insidious. I think one big topic in the last few years has been the OK hand sign. The one with a thumb and index finger forming a circle

and the other three fingers sticking up, meaning A-OK. Well, in 2017, some 4chan users created a-oh-huh. folks falsely claiming that the emoji had been co-opted by white supremacists. And then it was. White supremacists really did co-opt the OK symbol. Then it evolved and became real, and then you have to make a decision along the way. If we're emojipedia, do we say this does or doesn't mean white supremacy? And there's no good answer to that. No good answer because, as Jeremy sees it, if the official encyclopedia of emoji doesn't

recognize sinister double meanings, then it's ignoring reality, like if the dictionary only defined swastika as a religious icon. But if Emojopedia does, then it could legitimize how hate groups use emoji and permanently ruin them for everybody else. In the end, Jeremy did update the definition of the okay emoji and said it could be used as a symbol of white supremacy, quote, depending on context. Jeremy's job is the fact. founder of Amogipedia has landed him another job as a voting member of the Unicode Consortium, the group of tech companies and organizations that decide which emoji get added and which get changed. Can you go back to the beginning, like the big bang of emoji? If you cast your mind

back to the late 90s, we didn't have smartphones. They were all basic feature phones. Most of them were black and white. And this is the same in Japan, but they realized that, hey, we could send a bit more information. And they were mostly used, though. The original emoji sets were talking 1997 through 99 here. The first one we could find is a heart. And then it evolved to be things like clocks for timetables and weather icons. Over time, these emoji have grown as a set of characters.

And they've conveyed even more meaning and emotion. The Unicode Consortium, by the way, was founded even before emoji were invented back in 1991. And in my opinion, the Unicode Consortium, has had a massive impact on how we communicate, because its work, really, is to standardize characters in software on computers everywhere, so that around the globe we can communicate, no matter who we are, where we are, in what language we speak. Emoji are a part of this slow global standardization of computerized communication, which is relevant when you realize that even still,

Eggplant isn't exactly what someone means when they use the Eggplant emoji. So back to the dino fight, which may have been particularly poignant because Unicode has always struggled with emojis that are used to suggest gender identity. It's been a big issue where a lot of the original emojis were men if they had jobs and then the ones that didn't do anything meaningful that sort of had, they were doing gestures were mostly women. I.e. Policeman or woman getting a haircut.

There were a few, I don't want to say missteps, but in retrospect, there was a lot of early attempts to fix this by adding counterparts, where, for instance, there was a princess but no prince. So there was sort of a binary added, where if there was a woman, you'd get a man, and if there was a man, there was a woman. But we were left with this position where you couldn't just say, I'm going to the doctor and send an emoji of a doctor. You had to pick. Is it a woman doctor or a man doctor? Which, it was well-intentioned, I think, but it ended up with us having to say, well, what is the gender of everyone with an emoji? Unicode added a gender-neutral, gender non-conforming, non-binary person to its emoji set in 2017.

That was the same year that Unicode received its first proposal for a transgender flag emoji. There was a petition about the fact that the lobster emoji had been approved and why was there no trans flag emoji, as in sort of implying that, you know, why should lobsters get their own emoji when transgender people can't get their own emoji? There were a handful of proposals for the transgender flag, actually. One was finally added in 2020. Bisexuality, asexuality, and lesbian flags have yet to appear. But while Unicode can add or change an emoji, it can't tell people how to use it. Back in October, queer Twitter refused to let dynos go the way of the OK hand sign.

Almost immediately, the community bombarded turfs with takedowns and messages. of trans pride. One tweet seemed to bring this fight out of its bubble. It came from a pro-trans cis woman named Courtney Milan. She's a romance writer, but she also dabbles in creating emoji. And in a blow to the turf community, she tweeted a simple message. Quote, these emoji dinosaurs are both trans. I know this because I wrote the proposal to the Unicode Technical Committee asking for them.

The Unicode Consortium doesn't simply make. emoji. People propose emoji. It is a very official process. They are technical documents and they are trying to make the case for an emoji, but there's often little over-emphatic language often used about why it's essential this emoji be added and what the meaning is. Courtney Milan proposed the first set of dinosaur emoji back in 2016, a T-Rex, a Brocchiosaurus, and a triceratops. Her proposal is eight pages long, with charts showing how often people search for dinosaur emoji online, or how many books are about dinosaurs. There are about 500 identified as dinosaur erotica. It includes potential meanings for the

emoji, including, interestingly, someone who has, quote, failed to adapt to the times. Courtney was arguing that because she created these dinosaurs, she determined their gender, and she determined that they were transgender. Does Courtney's original proposal say the Dinos are, in fact, trans? No, I don't see anything in the proposal that really makes that case. But that doesn't mean the person proposing it can't declare they are. We've tried to ask Courtney about this. She hasn't agreed to talk to us yet.

Riley, for her part, wants us to remember that whatever we may think about the gender or sex of dinosaur emoji on Twitter, we should remember that the millions and millions of years of evolution in biological nature on planet Earth tells a story. that's a little more nuanced. So we don't know what determined the biological sex of non-avian dinosaurs, as in like triceratops and T-Rex, the ones that we love that went extinct 66 million years ago. Right. Because we don't have the genetics. So we don't know whether it was genetically determined,

or today, for example, some of their closest living relatives, like alligators and crocodiles, have temperature-dependent sex determination. So the temperature of the nest determines whether more males or females are going to be born. There are some birds that might have hormonal shifts during their life that make them present and behave differently. And the relevance there is that it tells us that what we think of as biological sex isn't binary and it's much more malleable than we ever really understood. In other words, in Earth's larger history, non-binary is way more common than people think. Speaking of which, one of the sickest burns made in the Twitter battle pointed out something, else the turfs should maybe remember when they post their dinosaur emoji.

This is a Jurassic Park plot point that I have to say I completely forgot about. Yeah. I don't even remember. It's so awesome, though. It's just the best. It is, it is, but I don't remember the discussion of the dinosaurs changing sex. Well, if you don't remember, Amory, hold on to your butts. Oh.

The people who make a huge mensurface. mistake in open Jurassic Park. In an effort to prevent the breeding of the dinosaurs, make all of the dinosaurs female. My grandpa said all the dinosaurs were girls. Amphibian DNA. What's that? But in their DNA cocktail when they're genetically engineering the dynos, they splice in some frog DNA. And some frog species, well, they can spontaneously change sex. Even though it might be a little bit annoying sometimes to have people relate the transgender experience to animals that just happen to switch sexes for whatever reason. You know, we do joke around that like those are trans dinosaurs. That's a major plot point of that movie is that they change sex and wreak havoc and the sense

that, you know, we're this trans menace and this current political moment where all this attention is being put on us and we're treated with so much distrust and sort of suspicion that it's a way to jokingly lean into that, I think a little bit, and say, okay, like, if you think I'm basically a monster, I might as well be, you know, a toothy monster and run amok in some degree, and the few bits of sort of representation that we get become very dear to us. Unlike so many other failed attempts to save a symbol, the push against anti-trans use of the dinosaur emoji, it seems to have worked. Some turfs still have dinosaurs in their profile, sure, But there are so many other people pairing the dynos with messages of pride, or just using them in the most literal sense.

And, you know, you might say something very specific to the turfs who tried to use dinosaurs in their profile as symbols of trans hate. Yeah, but your scientist were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should. And that might suggest that in the continuing evolution of the meaning of the dinosaur emoji, let alone broader opinions, people who try to use the same. symbols of dinosaurs for hate might be right in one way. Their attitudes might be in store for some extinction. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Do you want early tickets to events, swag, bonus content, Amory's T-Rex impressions, my Rockiosaurus fanfic.

Join our email list. We don't use it often, but when we use it, it counts. You will find it at WBUR.org slash endless thread. This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell and Ben Brock Johnson. We're co-hosted by us, Amory Severson. And Ben Brock Johnson. This episode was edited by Maureen McMurray. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed.

Special thanks to an additional production work from Nora Sacks, Kristen Torres, Quincy Walters, and Rachel Carlson. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and just a huge, huge pile of triceratops poop. The best scene, if you ask me. Yeah, it's a good one. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet, or just a huge, huge pile of triceratops. That you want us to stick our arms in and check to see why is that triceratops so sick. Oh, email endless thread at wbUR.org.

That was pretty.