"Adding gender to Unicode was a massive mistake right from the start," says Charlotte Buff, a German computer science student and activist.
"The basic premise just didn't make sense to me."
In Silicon Valley terms, diversity is difficult to scale: as small pictographs on a phone keyboard, emoji cannot ever hope to represent all facets of the human experience.
"Representation by specificity is inevitably doomed to failure," Ms Buff says.
What's more, Ms Buff says Unicode seems unwilling to fix the problem in a systematic way.
It was a mistake to add gender, but "now that they have done it, they stubbornly refuse to actually do gender properly".
Why, because they can't understand the binary? My heart goes out to these people because they need help. We live in a time where anyone can voice their feelings to many people no matter how abursed.
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