> Now what I find is less practical and more ridiculous is the sheer number of ways you can combine various codepoints to get different emoji representing famil

> Now what I find is less practical and more ridiculous is the sheer number of ways you can combine various codepoints to get different emoji representing families. On one hand, it’s impressive dedication to trying to be neutral and encompassing, on the other hand it is nightmarish just how many possibilities exist. My problem with this is that it's trying to solve a font-level problem at the alphabet-level. For example, it's fair to ask why a male-looking construction worker appears on some particular emoji keyboard, whilst a female-looking construction worker doesn't; yet that bias exists in the choice of font, not in the Unicode standard (where U+1F477 simply defines 'construction worker'). Vendors like Apple created this problem when they moved away from simple silhouettes and (AFAIK) neutral 'smiley faces', to more detailed images which required a bunch of arbitrary choices to be made (gender, skin tone, etc.). Rather than making a bunch of alternative fonts, akin to light/bold/serif/monospace/etc. those choices were instead shoehorned into Unicode's modifier-character system :(