Who stole the dino emoji?
The Boston public radio station WBUR did a conversational show several months ago about dinosaur emojis.
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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Ben: So I want us to explore this. 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.
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Ben: And we’re gonna start with this one: The saga of those innocent little dinosaur emoji that ended up getting used for something not so innocent.
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Amory: This is Riley Black.
Riley: I’m a science journalist and author. I’ve written books like Skeleton Keys and The Last Days of the Dinosaurs.
Ben: Riley LOVES her some dinos.
Riley: Big and loud, for whatever reason, was my jam.
They chat a bit about paleontology and dinosaur art, then say there are other people who like dinosaur art.
Riley: Many people who are queer, whether they are trans or some other form of genderqueer or whatever it is…We love dinosaurs.
Ben: 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 paleoartists online that identify as queer.
Amory: Type “dinosaur” into the LGBT subreddit. Hundreds of results, with pride dinos, rainbow dinos, dino moms, dino dads, and a LOT of puns. Like, Ally-saurus.
They speculate on why dinosaurs are a “genderqueer” thing.
Riley: 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.
Ben: 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.
Ben: Were you using the dinosaur emoji relatively frequently before all of this stuff happened?
Riley: 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 talk about it, I use a little dinosaur emoji, a comet emoji, a plant emoji and a raccoon emoji to kind of tell that story of like the dinosaurs going extinct and plants and mammals coming back afterwards and just having fun like with storytelling.
Amory: But a few months ago, Riley started to see dinosaur emoji that weren’t so fun.
Riley: I think my initial knee-jerk reaction, um, was just like, Well, you can’t have them. Like dinosaurs are ours.
Ben: The T. Rex and brachiosaurus 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.
Riley: 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.
Amory: Riley refers to the group of co-opters as TERFs, as in T-E-R-F. Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists, who call themselves “gender critical.” In other words, anti-trans.
Except no, not “anti-trans.” Anti the ridiculous ideology of Swappable Sex, but not Determined To Harm Trans People.
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.
We “promote the idea” that men are really men. Can you believe it?! Aren’t we silly.
Ben: Anyway, TERFs using dinosaur emoji was a problem for Riley.
Riley: To see, you know, our social enemies for lack of a better term taking, you know, these symbols and trying to use it as their dog whistle, it was something where it’s just like, Where’s this even coming from? This makes zero sense. And also dinosaurs are ours. I hate to speak for the entire trans or genderqueer community but, like, no. We’ve already been wondering about them and drawing them and interested.
Then why not find out where this is even coming from? Too much work?
Amory: No matter who you are, if you see something beloved taken over by someone else, that can be hard. Suddenly, genderqueer fans of dinos everywhere felt under attack as TERFs kept dropping the emoji into their feeds.
Ben: And we know how these things go. Just think of Pepe the frog. Or the Punisher skull. Or the swastika. When outsider groups latch onto a symbol, that symbol is often changed. Irrevocably.
Except that it wasn’t “taken over” by “someone else.” It was a retort to a stupid dismissive remark by David Lammy MP calling feminist women “dinosaurs.” The hosts finally get around to mentioning the pesky facts that undercut everything they’ve just been saying.
Ben: It’s not clear if TERFs knew they were co-opting something beloved to this slice of the genderqueer 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.
There’s no “may have been” about it. We watched it happen.
Ben: 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.
Amory: This was not big news. Except on Twitter, where a little pocket of the internet was blowing up. TERFs were offended by the analogy. And then, they embraced it.
Like one person who goes by the handle @LilyLilyMaynard. She started tweeting videos of her fellow TERFs outside the Labour Party’s headquarters.
Ben: They’re dressed in cheap, inflatable dinosaur costumes, singing off-key about genitals, which, we’re not going to play for obvious reasons. But if you Google “Labour 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.
Except it’s not their identity, it’s ours, and they’ve helped themselves to it. Ben and Amory would be all over it like a rash if it were Black identity being expropriated that way, but when it’s just stupid whiny women they’re full of contempt.
…along with everything else.
Gawds but I’m sick of dealing with grown adults who talk and act like they’re six-year-old bullies.
And the grown adults who spoil them. SO AM I.
Hold on, TERFS think that trans women are really men? What an odd belief. I can’t imagine why they would think that. Do they also think that cis women are really men?
Dinosaurs have been everybody’s. A lot of people have been wondering about them and drawing them and interested. For a long, long, time. Ever since the first dino bones were discovered. So maybe paleontologists think trans coopted them?
Dinosaurs do not belong to trans. Women’s spaces do not belong to trans. Women’s movement does not belong to trans. Lesbian bodies (or any other woman’s bodies) do not belong to trans. Women’s awards do not belong to trans. Women’s jobs (those saved for women) do not belong to trans. Women’s words do not belong to trans.
Though most of us are fine if transmen call themselves women. Because they are.
What are they going to claim as theirs next? The actual rainbow? The moon? Alpha Centauri? The universe?
“Cutesy dinosaur emojis are ours! We love cutesy dino emojis! We do! We love them!”
Yikes, how babyish it all is. It’s kindergarten sandbox level of stunted emotional development.
If you call your enemies “dinosaurs,” don’t be surprised that the epithet gets thrown back mockingly in your face.
The pouty, narcissistic entitlement really takes the cake.
@4: But trans people existed before the first dinosaur bones were dug up! In fact, trans people existed before women’s bodies! There have always been trans people; there haven’t always been women’s bodies!
I considered Riley a friend when he was Brian. I even proofed a copy of one of his first books. He could be a brilliant writer on paleontology at times. I had lost touch with him for a while, then he popped up coming out as a furry, not much later a mutual friend told me he was divorcing and announced he is trans and started posting IG pics in lingerie.
It’s kind of a shame. I liked Brian..
That’s really sad.
This ideology is not good for people.
Gotta love the irony of Genderists’ getting worked up about women’s taking their things. (Especially when the things weren’t the Genderists’ in the first place. That’s kind of their MO, though: take something then pretend it was always theirs.)
I can see it now. “They can’t call themselves TERFs! Only we are allowed to call them TERFs! And it must be an insult, they can’t use it as an identity! We’d never try to reform an insult, like
gayqueerhomosexual!”Iknklast wrote:
Thought I’d mention that the Genderists are quite butthurt over the Gender Critical using the Suffragette colors (white, purple, & green.) Transwomen weren’t allowed to vote back then EITHER, I guess. Most oppressed.
Remember the god botherers getting their knickers in a twist about rainbows? Same thing…
As far as “ownership” of dinosaurs, the “genderqueer community” are at the end of a very, very long line of other people and institutions that got there first. Waterhouse Hawkins’ Crystal Palace dinosaurs (which outlasted the Crystal Palace itself) were unveiled in 1854, just a little more than a dozen years after Richard Owen’s coinage of the word “dinosaur” itself. They’ve been up for grabs ever since, used by everyone from museums, gas companies (Sinclair), toy manufacturers, to movie studios, to make money. If the trans/queer paleoart community wants to make some sort of IP claim, they’ll have their work work cut out for them. The beauty is that dinosaurs “belong” to everyone. They are part of the very fabric of the story of life on Earth, which is our story. It’s not surprising that the “genderqueer” is ready to lay exclusive claim to something that doesn’t belong to them.
Ha ha, good one. Back atcha. You return the word “woman,” and maybe we can talk about dinosaur emojis later.
Liar. This isn’t something you hate. If you hated it so much, you wouldn’t be doing it at all. You’re relishing this chance to smear “[y]our social enemies.” You’re fine with taking this opportunity to muddy the waters, claiming feminist use of dinosaur emojis is some sort of secret handshake/dogwhistle.
Here, you’re pretending complete bafflement as to the motives and reasoning behind this move. As Ophelia points out, it was clearly too much work to uncover the real reasons that lead to this. It wasn’t random, capricious or arbitrary. Looking too closely would reveal ugly facts that would murder your beautiful theory of sheer bloody-minded, transphobic hatred. This amounts to the purposeful concealment of information that would ruin your story altogether, turning it into the opposite of what you’re claiming. It makes me wonder: are all of your articles and books as shittily researched as this? You might be able to frame the narrative for those only ever hearing about it from you, but you’ll never fool anyone who already knows the facts of the matter. This is a risky strategy for a science writer. It destroys the trust of knowledgible readers, who will now see you as little more than an unreliable, partisan hack. Where does that leave you when your product is reputation, and trust itself?
Eventually, grudgingly, comes the admission that there is in fact more to the feminist use of dinosaur emojis than the simple, dishonest explanation of hard-hearted anti-trans bigotry. That it is a snarky, political response to an attempt to shame women standing up for their rights. Trans activists can’t admit of any conflict between women’s rights and trans “rights.” They are forced to portray feminists’s legitimate interest in defending their rights and spaces against male appropriation as blind, hateful anti-trans spitefulness. To do otherwise opens the door to questioning and debate which trans talking points cannot survive.
Some years ago I met “Riley Black” when he was just plain old Brian Switek, bespectacled science writer. No blue hair, no head tilt. This was before he “came out” as a “furry” https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/21/furry-wild-side-fursona-animal-nature Does the furry “community” get to claim “ownership” of mammals? No, though I’d say they’ve got a better claim to them than the “trans and genderqueer” one does to dinosaurs. At least “furries” are actually mammals themselves. The optics are a bit better too, since, save for birds, dinosaurs are largely known for being extinct, which is an ironically inapt choice of emblematic creature for a community constantly claiming that they are potential victims of “genocide.” As far as a better icon for the trans struggle for pretend “rights” goes, I would recommend they stick with unicorns, which are, appropriately, imaginary. It would be a perfect fit if they were also poisonous.
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The entire story is literally, explicitly, right there in the digital public record; it is a matter of recent history and there is no reason (and no excuse) not to know exactly what happened, if you happen to be interested in ‘why feminists use dino emojis’.
Those of us of a certain age are quite used to people referring to our contemporaries as dinosaurs, in any number of areas. American left-leaning politics is full of news bites about generational differences in political views coupled with calls for patience to wait for the “dinosaurs” to die out. And surely even these young people have encountered accusations that gender-critical feminists are all old, white, “second wave” feminists. One would think they could make the connection even without having to source one specific flashpoint.